Westminster University - Utah
PA-5: Diversity and Equity Coordination

Westminster has an institutional office and a Student Diversity and Inclusion Center. The Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is led by an Associate Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer, who seats on the President’s Cabinet and is responsible for providing leadership on Westminster’s strategy for bolstering diversity, advancing equity, and enhancing inclusion across the institution through strategic planning, programs and education, collaboration and coordination, and outreach.

Faculty and Staff offered trainings include: Inclusive Workspaces (Basic policies and practices that foster inclusive work environments.); Diversity at Westminster (Overview of how diversity is framed at Westminster.); Introduction to Bias (Explore different types of biases and how it can impact your personal and professional practice.); Inclusive Teaching (Learn basic strategies for creating classroom environments that support student success of all students.); Diversity in Hiring (Inclusive and legal strategies for incorporating diversity in the talent search, reviewing, and development process.); Cultural Competence (An introduction on how to build your awareness and rethink practices.); Diversity and Leadership (Exploring a framed leadership model and identifying diversity as a critical component.)
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All Students at Westminster are required to take a course with a diversity emphasis as part of their W-core (general ed.) requirements. Courses with a diversity emphasis pass through a diversity council to ensure that the curriculum is robust. Diversity emphasis courses are defined as follows:

Diversity Emphasis (DE) courses challenge students to examine differences of power, privilege, and subordination based on at least two of the following categories: race, ethnicity, social class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, national origin, age, and religion. For a course to meet DE requirements, at least 75% of the course material must be devoted to the examination of differences of power, privilege, and subordination across two or more of these categories. Graded assignments assess students’ ability to explain, apply, and synthesize understanding of global and U.S. issues related to the selected categories.

• Power is the unequal distribution of resources globally and in U.S. society, which results in some individuals or groups holding greater access to and control over other human beings, events, systems, and structures [e,g., culture, politics, law, economics, environment, etc.].
• Privilege is unearned, often invisible power in the form of benefits, advantages, and rights available to certain members of society at the expense of others due to social group membership perceived as “normal,” “natural,” “mainstream,” and/or membership in a dominant culture. Privilege allows persistent exclusion and devaluation of “them,” “those,” “othered,” or “marginalized” human beings.
• Subordination is ideologically sanctioned subjugation of one individual or group by a more powerful individual or group, and it is often enforced by physical, psychological, social, or economic threats or force. Subordination also refers to the injustices suffered by marginalized groups in their everyday interactions with members of the dominant group.

By viewing these issues through multiple cultural lenses, students develop global, social, and ethical awareness, and they consider ways to act on this awareness in their own lives.

In addition to diversity coursework, the majority of on-campus jobs for students, involve diversity and inclusion training. The director of the Student Diversity and Inclusion Center provides training for student workers. Trainings are tailored to specific programs and promote social identity and student development. Training include discussions of power, privilege, and oppression that focus on interpersonal communication via different levels of privilege and lived experience.