Advancing the Plan | May 2023
We are asking RIT leaders to share with us just a bit of what they are doing to advance the RIT Action Plan for Race and Ethnicity. We have two updates: the first from Dean James Hall, University Studies and Executive Director, School of Individualized Study followed by Vice President for University Advancement, Phil Castleberry.
The School of Individualized Study serves a diverse community of learners of all backgrounds and educational experiences. Curricular flexibility is meant, first and foremost, to facilitate access to RIT and sustain student presence regardless of life circumstance. We provide opportunity face to face – and we provide a path to degree completion that is fully online – but consistently with high touch attention to the specifics of student need.
As such, it is not surprising that our unit is home, in somewhat disproportionate numbers, to a significant population of deaf/HH, AALANA, adult and non-traditional, low income and first-generation students – sometimes in remarkable intersection of identities and experiences. We are honored to serve this diversity – always with an eye to the kinds of attention and support that produces actionable social capital that aids in sustainable social mobility.
Beyond customer service? Despite modest size, we have important faculty, staff, and programmatic initiatives that we hope signal our commitment to the plan – and constructively advance RIT’s work in reconciliation. The Flower City Folk initiative, supported by Professor of Practice Hannah Davis, is a New York State Council on the Arts funded program, to build out high quality folklore and community arts programming in Rochester – and especially efforts that celebrate the diversity of the city and the arrival of new ethnic, immigrant, and refugee communities. Principal Lecturer Tom Hanney’s Blues teaching and performance programming introduces hundreds of RIT students to the joys of musical performance – but also to the African American musical legacy in Rochester and the United States. Assistant Professor Makini Beck teaches important courses on Urban Poverty and Hip Hop – and has recently partnered with DDI on a Cross-Cultural Research travel course that has focused on providing study away opportunities for our AALANA population. As time allows – Dean Jim Hall continues research on the desegregation of American higher education – and the impacts such justice work had on the development and trajectory of core professional disciplines.
As programmers – we have built out a distinctive partnership with local advertising firm, Partners & Napier, on the development of intentional interventions to teach students about how to build high quality, sustaining networks that facilitate the accumulation of actionable social capital. Research shows that AALANA students, in particular, benefit from efforts that place them in conversation with mentors and coaches, but, better still, develop the metacognitive capacity to recognize and understand the nature and function of high quality networks of support. And while the McChord Gap Year Entrepreneurship Fellowship program is not directed specifically at building AALANA business capacity – near half of our launched student businesses have been minority owned.
Our mission as a unit is to deliver personalized attention – whatever that might mean – to each and every student. We do it by trying to understand as holistically as possible the nature and character of the life circumstances that has brought a student to our door. Sometimes folks are thriving and we just do the best we can to open up access to resources and get out of the way. Sometimes folks are alienated from the institution and perhaps even from higher education and its promises. In those cases, we do the best we can to remind that things can be better – and we are here to support and scaffold for future success. In all these ways – we seek to help RIT advance the plan.
University Advancement
RIT thrives because of the transformative experiences provided by the diversity of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni. University Advancement strives to be intentional in our efforts to be champions of the Action Plan for Race and Ethnicity to both internal and external constituents.
With the 2021 launch of the Sentinel Society, RIT’s leadership annual giving society, a Diversity and Inclusion Fund was spotlighted as one of the key funding priorities. To date, alumni and friends have committed nearly $250,000 to this fund, which allows for increased services and resources to be made available for students who self-identify as members of underrepresented groups, as well provide support for recruitment and retention efforts of diverse faculty and staff.
Our team has taken an aggressive approach to meeting and engaging a more inclusive group of alumni, with a goal of diversifying our pool of future alumni volunteers. Through this effort, we have newly re-connected with more than 150 individuals in the past two years, and in 2021, we created a full-time director-level position to focus on our engagement with our increasingly diverse alumni network. This position also helps us drive strategy for reaching constituents in ways that are more true to their identity, affinity, and customs. We also now have a standing DEI committee on our Alumni Association Board of Directors, which is tasked with volunteerism, data integrity, and improving education on diversity issues.
These efforts to strengthen the diversity and inclusivity of our alumni volunteer base will help us reach our goal to nominate a broader and deeper pool of candidates for key leadership roles on our Board of Trustees, President’s Roundtable, Alumni Board of Directors, and regional and national councils. In addition, in coordination with other divisions across the university, we revised the criteria for RIT’s Distinguished Alumni Awards to be more inclusive in recognizing the many ways our alumni make meaningful impacts within their immediate communities and RIT at large.
We have overhauled our hiring and retention practices, including requiring unconscious bias training for search committee members for all positions, and including an anonymous feedback process during initial review so all applicants are reviewed fairly. All of our job descriptions are vetted to ensure that we are inclusive and intentional in our language. In addition, for senior-level openings, we have reserved funds to provide targeted advertising placement for underrepresented populations.
Our staff is engaging with university-wide priorities as well; we strongly encourage all of our staff members to register for the Cultural Humility Certificate program. Close to 100% of the division has taken at least one course, while seventeen (21%) have completed their certificates. Our division also covered the cost for all interested team members to attend the 2023 Women’s Leadership Summit.
We strongly encourage our team to explore external professional development, partnering with local, regional, and national organizations to ensure that RIT is in the vanguard of thought leadership. Victor Santiago BS ’13 (he/him/his), Associate Director for Young Alumni & Students, presented at the CASE District II Conference in New York City in March, and Corinne Green Endres (she/her/hers), Associate Director of Regional Alumni Programs, received the district’s Rising Star Award. Chris D’Orso (he/him/his), Director of Marketing and Communications, served on a panel at the Leadership Ontario Day of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, an event keynoted by Dr. Keith Jenkins.