C&PE 619 Petroleum Engineering Lab with Dr. Paul Willhite.

For many faculty, dialogues related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging can appear to be “outside” the scope of your research, teaching, and service. If that is the case, we hope you might rethink this perspective: to consider the ways in which intellectual diversity is a byproduct of the curation of a diverse representation of knowledge production from around the world. We encourage you to reflect on the multiple overlapping identities that many humans hold simultaneously at the university.

Our community’s strength is in our variety—including race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation to gender identities, age, veteran status, and parental status and many other aspects of lived experience.

We encourage faculty to think about who is represented in the courses they teach, in the research they conduct, and the service in which they engage. Who is excluded from our disciplinary perspectives?

The DEIB Toolbox leverages campus resources in research, teaching, and service to help you track your participation and engagement in making our campus and classrooms inclusive spaces of intellectual diversity—one that welcomes all Jayhawks to engage and question the world around them.

You might find it helpful to:

  • Explore our teaching and research resources for diversifying the intellectual scope of your syllabi via Center for Teaching Excellence and DEIB-sponsored workshops.
  • Engage in tracking your research, teaching and service efforts that help KU move the needle towards achieving institutional goals in building an inclusive campus of belonging for all.
  • Attend campus talks, performances, and workshops that help you gain new knowledge and skill of DEIB that challenges you, helps make DEIB visible in your discipline.
  • Attend campus talks, performances, and workshops to increase your fluency in discourses of intersectionality and the various identities held by your colleagues and students.

 

How to get started?

Every unit on campus is charged to envision and operationalize a plan to strengthen diversity, equity, and inclusion. We want every student, staff, and faculty member to be a part of tracking the progress we are making together to make sure that each Jayhawk feels valued. By lifting the broad range of cultural and lived experiences in our everyday life at KU—as an integral part of defining what excellence and belonging look like—we can work together to lift each Jayhawk to their highest level of excellence on campus.

 

Becoming part of the change

  • Ask your department chair if they have a DEIB Plan for their unit. Ask what efforts are being made at the department level to ensure all faculty feel engaged and valued.
  • Join faculty organizations that are working to make equity central to their mission and practice.
  • Stand in support of your fellow faculty members who may experience differential treatment because of the identities they hold.
  • Use the DEIB Toolbox resources for faculty to deepen your understanding of experiences that are different from your own so that you can experience the intellectual diversity of KU.
  • Create inclusive classroom materials and be conscious of curating cultures of belonging in your teaching, research, and service.
  • Track your participation in campus, professional, and research-related experiences that contribute to advancing DEIB efforts on campus.
  • Make your chair aware of your commitment to DEIB and your willingness to help execute and operationalize the unit-level plan.
  • Subscribe to the DEIB newsletter for reports on our progress and work to lift all Jayhawks.
  • Ask your department chair if they have an Equity Advisor in the unit. If you are interested in becoming an Equity Advisor in your unit, please contact diversity@ku.edu.
  • Consider forming or joining an equity and inclusion committee in your unit that can share faculty needs with the chair.

 

DEIB Resources for Faculty