Universitywide Diversity Goals
The strategic diversity framework outlines overarching goals intended to focus campuswide efforts and guide unit- and department-level diversity plans. The framework’s core goals focus on four areas:
- Reflecting the diversity of God’s kingdom. This goal focuses on developing comprehensive strategies for attracting, welcoming, and retaining diverse students, faculty, and staff.
- Cultivating diversity and reconciliation competencies. This goal focuses on creating a learning environment where all students, faculty, and staff develop the competencies needed to facilitate understanding, healing, and reconciliation across differences.
- Fostering an environment of belonging. This goal focuses on promoting respect and dignity for all members of the SPU community and removing barriers to meaningful participation in the life of our campus.
- Maximizing resources for equitable outcomes. This goal focuses on leveraging University resources toward the alleviation of disparities in student outcomes and experiences.
Department-level diversity action plans
Between 2018–2021, each department was asked to develop a diversity plan with an emphasis on concrete actions to advance the overarching goals. The four goal areas provide broad expectations with multiple pathways for achieving them, allowing flexibility in the design of action plans to fit departmental needs.
Capacity Building
Building individual and institutional capacity to engage the work of diversity is a primary focus of the strategic diversity framework. The Office of Inclusive Excellence carries out this focus in a number of ways:
- Providing professional development workshops
- Consulting with students, staff, and faculty on diversity-related matters
- Curating an SPU diversity timeline and increasing historical understanding about SPU's engagement with issues of diversity
- Working with search committees to identify strategies for hiring that are informed by diversity, equity, and inclusion principles
- Establishing and maintaining a faculty and staff resource guide that includes readings, videos, and teaching tools to facilitate continued growth in the work of diversity