Goucher College
PA-5: Assessing Diversity and Equity

A collaboration of five colleges (Goucher, McDaniel, Ursinus, Washington, and Washington & Jefferson) was awarded a $300,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation to implement a three-year project to improve student learning and engagement by assessing and enhancing diversity initiatives inside and outside the classroom. Planning teams from each school met jointly and with their own campus communities to develop themes and questions to be pursued during campus visits. Visiting teams from two other colleges came to Goucher and conducted focus groups on the topic of campus climate with various populations within the Goucher community, including faculty, staff, and students. Comprehensive reports summarizing the themes heard in these focus groups were prepared and shared with appropriate campus constituents for action.

When performing retention studies, race is a factor that is examined.

Goucher assesses its diversity and equity by measuring efforts against the standards clearly defined in the college’s diversity statement, which reads in part, “As a dynamic community of learners, we renew our commitment to social justice and reaffirm diversity and multiculturalism as fundamental and valued components of our liberal arts mission and institutional ethos. Because we learn by being exposed to and challenged by different ways of seeing and understanding the world, we value diversity in all dimensions-voice, experience, perspective, heritage, culture, values, class, gender, race, ability, age, sexual orientation, and religion-and strive to build and sustain a richly diverse and multicultural curriculum and program. ... Our commitment to diversity and multiculturalism shall inform all aspects of the institution, including curriculum, co-curricular activities, community governance and campus culture. Indeed, we seek to carry these values into the world at large; to promote tolerance, inclusiveness, democratic values, and learning across differences everywhere; and to help shape the local and global discourse about diversity and multiculturalism and their evolving relationship with the broadest possible educational enterprise.”