University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
PA-4: Diversity and Equity Coordination

Campus Climate Council The Campus Climate Council strives to make the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse a campus community that recognizes, values, celebrates, and achieves equity amongst students, faculty and staff. The Council takes a social justice approach to achieving equity across the campus and has long served as a clearinghouse of information and a source of collaboration across institutional divides. The Campus Climate Council is convened by the Associate Dean of Diversity & Inclusion and comprises individuals from all segments of the campus community, including students, faculty, staff, and administrators. The Campus Climate Council meets monthly during the academic year. The agenda includes regular informational updates from offices and departments on campus whose work relates to diversity and inclusion, an opportunity for students to share issues or concerns, and open discussion of any other emerging issues that may be of interest to those in attendance. The Chancellor and other senior campus leaders attend in person from time to time, and they receive regular updates from Council members. DIversity Organization Coalition (DOC) The DOC is a collaboration of multicultural students that strives to engage students in social justice issues and advocacy through education. Furthermore, it is an open-minded community where all ideas are respected and individuals foster, honor, and share responsibilities for the mission. This coalition of student organizations was created to advocate issues related to academic transitions, culture, social class, geography, spirituality, race, gender, ethnicity, ability, sexual identity, and gender identity/expression, while forging critical alliances and bridges to create a supportive environment through academic and personal connections on the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus and community.

Our Campus Climate and Pride Center offices conduct numerous trainings and educational events: ○ A recent focus has been training for students on bystander intervention as a means of empowering students who witness an incident with the skills to speak up while maintaining respect and civility. ○ Campus Climate specializes in a wide variety of workshops to help the campus community use inclusive language, work with difficult people, understand the concept of privilege, and avoid microaggressions. Brown-bag events, typically 4 per semester, offer opportunities for discussion of films or topics. ○ Campus Climate’s most popular events include Awareness through Performance, an evening of one-act plays collaboratively written and produced by a diverse troupe of students. All ATP performances are new every year. Over the past several years, ATP has been invited to present at a variety of off-campus locations. ○ The Pride Center conducts training for students, faculty, and staff who want to learn more in order to be allies to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. Pride also organizes panels for classes, offering many UW-L students the opportunity to ask, anonymously, questions about LGBT life that they honestly want to understand but fear it would be rude or hurtful to ask in social settings. Student evaluations of these panels indicate that many students learn new reasons to challenge their own prejudices. Our Diversity & Inclusion website http://www.uwlax.edu/diversity-inclusion/ is prominently featured on the top toolbar of the UW-L website. The site itself provides prospective and current students, faculty, and staff with information about the services and opportunities UW-L offers, and explains the many ways people can get involved. Campus Climate, the Pride Center, the Office of International Education (study abroad), and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, all maintain small circulating libraries with specialized diversity-oriented collections of books, films, and other educational materials that are open to the campus. Murphy Library has recently catalogued all these materials so that the campus community can easily find them electronically by searching a single campus-wide catalogue. Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning (CATL): ● (CATL) offers workshops to help instructors teach in a diverse classroom (e.g., infusing diversity issues, diverse perspectives, and research by diverse researchers into course content; planning for good discussions; designing effective group learning experiences) ● Workshops focused on course designs and pedagogies proven to serve most students well (e.g., backward design of courses; multiple approaches to designing a motivational classroom climate; research-informed course design; scholarly approaches to teaching and learning through lesson study and the scholarship of teaching and learning) ● Inclusive Excellence grant program: small stipends for faculty to develop, implement, and assess a solution to a diversity-related problem in their course ● Stereotype Threat Initiative: In cooperation with the UW-System’s Office of Professional and Instructional Development (OPID), UW-L launched an initiative (Fall 2013) to address one well-documented cause of underperformance that can occur when a negative stereotype about a group’s abilities is active (“stereotype threat”). In the Fall of 2013, we brought Prof. Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, a well-known expert on stereotype threat, for our annual teaching and learning conference; Prof. Purdie-Vaughns presented to about 120 instructors and staff. At the end of her presentation, we distributed 110 copies of Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi (2008), a very readable book that explains the discovery of stereotype threat and the development and testing of the interventions. CATL developed reading groups and discussion questions for Whistling Vivaldi, and followed up with another workshop at our spring teaching and learning conference. Research indicates that underperformance due to stereotype threat can be severe, and that students who underperform in a gateway course to a major are unlikely to persist in that major. Researchers who study stereotype threat have developed several interventions that appear promising when they are implemented carefully (which is not easy to do). We plan to build on this initiative for the next several years. ● Web-based resources: CATL maintains a website of IE-relevant resources; the entire CATL website is currently undergoing revision that will enhance instructors’ ability to find those resources and access those services The Office of Affirmative Action provides additional training for employees involved in recruitment and retention processes: ○ The Office of Affirmative Action provides a mandatory training on inclusive hiring practices and implicit bias for all employees and administrators serving on Search & Screen committees and interview panels. ○ The Office of Affirmative Action provides training on inclusivity and implicit bias for faculty and administrators serving on the Joint Promotion Committee and on departmental Promotion/Retention/Tenure (PRT) committees, all of whom play a role in the evaluation and career progression of tenured and tenure-track faculty.

Additional web address with UWL information on cultural competence trainings: http://www.uwlax.edu/diversity-inclusion/ http://www.uwlax.edu/catl/ http://www.uwlax.edu/pride-center/ Additional website URL where information about the diversity and equity committee, office and/or officer is available: http://www.uwlax.edu/Campus-Climate/Our-mission/