It has been four years since George Washington President Steven Knapp charged a council to propose recommendations for cultivating a more inclusive university climate. Since it released its 12 key recommendations in 2011, the President’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion has made significant strides in making those goals a reality.
“Building the excellence of our university by making it as diverse and inclusive as possible will always be a work in progress,” said Dr. Knapp. “But I am greatly encouraged by what the council has already accomplished, thanks to the efforts and imagination of its very fine leadership and membership.”
The council’s set of recommendations were developed through a campus-wide conversation and review of best practices in higher education, said council co-chair Terri Reed, GW’s first vice provost for diversity and inclusion.
“Having a sense of what the broad community deemed important was invaluable as I established an agenda for my work and that of the council’s going forward,” Dr. Reed said.
One of the high priority recommendations the council proposed is for GW to “increase student diversity by strengthening admissions, recruitment, financial aid awards and other enrollment practices that are targeted to multicultural and diverse populations.”
To achieve this goal, the university created an enrollment management position that now oversees the offices responsible for undergraduate admissions, graduate enrollment, graduate and undergraduate aid, in addition to the registrar’s office, thereby creating an infrastructure that allows the university to act strategically in recruiting and retaining a diverse student body, Dr. Reed said.
When hiring someone for the new role, the search committee looked for a candidate who had previous success enrolling a diverse class and would contribute to the ongoing dialogue about enhancing persistence and graduation rates for all students, Dr. Reed said. Enter Laurie Koehler, the former interim dean of enrollment and dean of admissions at Bryn Mawr College. Ms. Koehler became GW’s first senior associate provost for enrollment management in 2013.
Since Ms. Koehler’s arrival, she has strived to strengthen ties between the departments within the newly formed Division of Enrollment Management.
“We are also using institutional and national data to drive our decision-making about where to recruit, how to recruit and what to communicate to ensure that we are reaching exceptional students who may not have considered applying to GW,” Ms. Koehler said.
A second recommendation that the council proposed is for GW to “enhance the use of disadvantaged businesses, minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses and veteran-owned businesses located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.”
In support of this initiative, the council’s external relations working group, led by Deputy Counsel Charles Barber, worked closely with the university’s procurement office to address how to best create an infrastructure that would increase supplier diversity at GW.
The university is now in the final stages of implementing an i-supplier module for its procurement system, which will help new vendors register with GW. The system will simplify vendor registration—which was previously a manual process—and also, for the first time, vendors will be able to classify themselves by selecting the goods they offer and the business classification they fall under. This information will allow the university to register and track different types of vendors such as veteran- and women-owned businesses.
“We had to come up with a way to capture the information of who the university is doing business with in respect to diversity characteristics,” Mr. Barber said. “You can’t tell where you want to go until you know where you started.”
Another recommendation urged the university to “incorporate and promote, via the Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service, more activities that involve long-term partnerships and significant projects with measurable goals with community organizations.”
The focus of the Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service has been on building high-quality service-learning experiences for GW students, said Amy Cohen, who was appointed executive director of the center in 2010.
“We have just completed a strategic planning process for the Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service,” Ms. Cohen said. “Key to that plan is the creation of more opportunities for service that are intrinsically tied to research and learning and are designed to make a measurable difference in the quality of life in D.C. and the region. This takes long-term, trusting partnerships.”
The center has recently revitalized the longstanding GW Neighbors Project to strengthen the long-term relationship with local nonprofits and to enhance the training and support GW student leaders receive. The program, now called engageDC, matches about 100 students with 10 nonprofits in sustained relationships. The center has also doubled the number of academic service-learning courses at GW—there are now 65 courses that engage students in real-world problem-solving and service to the community.
Beginning in January, the Council on Diversity and Inclusion was reconfigured, which is intended to strengthen the council’s capacity to drive a campus-wide diversity agenda. The council will now have two committees: the Leadership Committee for Diversity and Inclusion (LCDI) and the Implementation Committee for Diversity and Inclusion (ICDI).
Each vice president and dean has identified a senior member of his or her staff to sit on the leadership committee. This committee will advise the university’s senior leadership and the vice provost with the goal of fostering campus-wide engagement, responsibility and progress toward accomplishing GW’s diversity and inclusion goals. The implementation committee will convene key constituents, who will develop, influence and implement both campus-wide and unit-specific initiatives. The members of this committee will also identify opportunities to strengthen and improve collaborations across units.
“It is a shared responsibility and a shared agenda,” Dr. Reed said. “We hope the new structure allows us to better harness, support and recognize the important work that is in progress throughout our community on all of our campuses.”