On November 1, Aimee Hosemann and Rob Zinkan hosted a webinar about RHB’s latest strategic planning research. They cover the third installment, Committing to DEIB in a Continuing Climate of Challenge, from a three-installment research report on modern strategic planning. A recording of the webinar is also available.

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Transcript

Rob Zinkan

Well let’s begin, and it’s great to have you with us. We are excited about today’s session. Welcome! This is the second in our webinar series about RHB’s latest strategic planning research. So again, thank you for being here, and thank you for your interest in this topic, and thank you for the important work that you do for your institution. 

We have a range of functions that are represented today from our registration list. We have academic affairs to enrollment management to DEIB to institutional planning and effectiveness to student affairs to alumni engagement and advancement. So we love to see this interest from all of these different areas, and all of you—all of these roles—have a role to play in this work and certainly have a role to play in strategic planning. So welcome!

If you have been following RHB’s strategic planning research, we are glad to have you back. If you’re new to this research, we’re glad to see you for the first time and appreciate your interest in this research, and we’ll quickly bring you up to speed on the research and how we got to today in just a moment. And you may also be new to RHB, and our work, our firm, we are focused on helping higher ed institutions reach greater relevance. So All of our work is oriented toward that: greater relevance for colleges and universities. And we guide institutions in achieving greater relevance by helping them across four different practice areas. 

Enrollment Management, we already said hello to Ken Anselment, our vice president who leads the EM practice. And there, RHB supports institutions’ enrollment success at each phase of the student journey, all the way from discovery to degree. Executive Counsel is where we help institutions with enterprise-wide change, which includes today’s topic and our work with institutional leaders on strategic planning, often in the research phase and understanding an institution’s starting point and their current market position as they embark on strategic planning. Institutional Marketing, and that is more of the marketing you can’t see from organizational effectiveness to data-informed institutional positioning, helping a college or university select and secure an authentic market position. And Slate and Related Technology, led by Vice President Erin Gore, and RHB is proud to have the leading CRM practice for Slate in the world.

So that’s RHB, and we would like to begin by providing some context for this strategic planning research and for today’s topic. In 2020, RHB undertook a research study analyzing 108 higher education strategic plans. And beyond asking this question that you see, what makes a strategic plan actually strategic, we wanted to answer several questions: Who are these plans ultimately for? Why is the process often so complex and even cumbersome? Even the question of why bother with strategic planning? And then, as we began this research, the pandemic came, which raised additional questions. Particularly, amid change and disruption, how relevant, how useful can a plan truly be? Especially 10-year or longer? 

So across those 108 plans, we saw five overarching priorities rise to the top. We saw that overwhelmingly, diversity and equity-related goals appeared most frequently in plans, and were often part of all goals in some way, shape or form—building more DEIB focus and subgoals into student success goals for example. And for clarification, these were all strategic plans that were active in 2020. 

We then identified the 16 most-strategic plans out of our set of 108. And the plans that were most strategic, they laid out a clear roadmap for changes in behavior that were tied to relatively few goals or few priorities. Choices were clearly made, and audiences were considered. They had an encompassing diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging perspective. And they defined metrics, among several other qualities. 

These plans envisioned a detailed and holistic perspective toward DEIB goals and metrics. And we were inspired to hear how these leaders and these institutions described DEIB as a strategic imperative, and they shared with us the significant work they were undertaking. One president told us, as you see here, “If we aren’t inclusive, we can’t be excellent. It’s a value.” Our book, What Makes a Strategic Plan ‘Strategic,’ has an entire chapter devoted just to the DEIB discussion because both strategic plans and leaders had so much to say about it.

Another leader explained that any plan that he was going to be a part of or lead would have to have diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging as an important facet, because DEIB is everyone’s job. This was a priority for him and, by extension, one for the university. It became one for the entire institution. Presidents of institutions with plans that exhibited the most strategic tendencies saw this as work of “a cast of thousands,” as one of the presidents told us. They saw DEIB as a moral and ethical responsibility, which Aimee will delve into further. And this was true whether it was a public institution or a private institution. So again, it was energizing for us to hear how leaders were orienting around moral and ethical values that they were putting into action.

So we continued this research earlier this year into 2023. And we went back to the leaders of institutions that had the most-strategic plans to find out, did they achieve their goals, and how are they doing now? And we discovered some emerging themes and interesting dynamics there that have led these 16 institutions in a variety of directions. 

We also, earlier this year, started exploring new strategic plans. We looked at 54 new plans that launched either this calendar year or last calendar year to compare findings from those to those from our initial 2020 study of 108 plans. And we provided an overview of these findings in our previous webinar in September, and that is available on the RHB website. If you didn’t participate there, you can go back and catch up and dig into those findings further. And we’ll also share the printed versions as part of the webinar follow-up materials. 

So here you see for new strategic plans, we found that institutions are mostly pursuing the same types of goals and ambitions. Four of the five categories of overarching priorities from 2020, those were again the most frequent across new plans. And this time you see, student experience and success was the most frequent overall. That doesn’t necessarily mean though that DEIB was less prevalent this time or in new plans. 

We saw DEIB, for instance, among institutional values. In new plans, values were more visible than previously. The pandemic and social justice movements are among the reasons that institutions appear to be recommitting to core values, at least according to new strategic plans, and they appear to be connecting the choices they’re making about their future back to their institutional core values.

So Aimee is going to share what we learned from this 2023 research from interviewing institutional leaders and analyzing new strategic plans in terms of implications for DEIB. DEIB continues to be of critical importance to the leaders we interviewed, even though—as we know—the political, the judicial climate has made that work more difficult. 

So, we want to start with a quick poll question here and ask you how DEIB is present as an imperative in your institution’s strategic plan. Whether as an overarching goal or priority, represented in sub-goals or sub-initiatives, embedded throughout, or evident—as we’re seeing more in new plans—evident from the beginning of the plan as an institutional value, or perhaps not present or minimally present across the strategic plan. Okay, let’s take a look. So a fairly even split across these categories, and interestingly only a few where it’s evident from the beginning of the plan as an institutional core value. Okay. That’s helpful to know, so thank you, thank you for sharing. We want to get your feedback on another item here in just a bit. 

Before we do that, one more bit of context about strategic planning and this research, and context in terms of how we think about strategic plans as being truly “strategic.” And if Aimee and I could boil down strategy to just a couple of essential elements, it would be that strategy, number one, should reflect a set of choices. And number two, that strategy should require a change in behavior. In other words, if your plan is full of items that you should already be doing, those items aren’t necessarily strategic. And perhaps some may say that about DEIB, because as stated earlier, if it’s an ethical and moral responsibility, you should already be doing it. But, because business as usual won’t enable an institution to achieve DEIB goals and priorities and because this work often does require, indeed require, a change in behavior, this work is absolutely strategic. 

We also saw from our previous research, and it was revealing that nearly three-quarters of plans didn’t have clear success metrics, didn’t have KPIs, key performance indicators. And we’ve emphasized how clarity here is so essential. A campus community needs to understand what success means, what success looks like. We can’t just say “strengthen” or “enhance,” which we found often to be the verbiage of higher education strategic plans. There need to be specific markers to track progress and assign responsibility and accountability. Yet, while those markers or those milestones of progress and success are needed, we know that there’s no finish line for DEIB work. The work is never finished, so those markers of progress can’t simply be checking boxes. And you’ll likely have qualitative metrics associated with your strategic planning progress as well.

And the other criterion that we’ve emphasized across the research findings is that the most-strategic plans undertake an honest, sometimes brutally honest, self-examination. Those who most clearly stated challenges that they were facing, those institutions were best equipped to make a persuasive, compelling case that the goals, the outcomes that they set forth in their strategic plan were the right ones for their institution. And if an institution was open and honest about where it’s falling short, that gave a lot of credibility to the goals within their strategic plan. 

And we see in our organizational development work, we sometimes hear from deans and other leaders who tell us if you put all of those out there, all the challenges, not everybody’s aware of those, and if you make them aware, then that’s not necessarily a great feeling for your campus community. They want to try to fix everything right away. But when it comes to DEIB work, there are no easy fixes. And this points back to seeing strategy as choice-making. 

And we’ve seen impressive examples throughout our research of this honest self-examination of being open about institutional challenges. And that’s such a different approach than using a strategic plan as a PR activity to showcase how great your institution is and to announce how it’s going to be even greater in the future thanks to your strategic plan ambitions. And that brings us back to the very original question that prompted this strategic planning research that we took on at RHB is: What is a strategic plan for? 

So with that, it’s my pleasure to turn it over to Dr. Aimee Hosemann, RHB’s Director of Qualitative Research, to lead the discussion on DEIB themes from our 2023 research. And as you saw in the introduction, Aimee is trained as an anthropologist in studying the relationships of language, culture and identity in contexts that include higher ed. And her work at RHB in support of our clients has helped colleges and universities improve organizational capability, improve communications effectiveness, and improve institutional coherence. So, Aimee, I will turn to you.

Aimee Hosemann

Thank you so much, Rob, and welcome to everyone and thanks, Rob, for getting that context set so that we can think through what is it that we’ve discovered in this most recent round of research. And not just that, but what is it from that research that will enable you, regardless of your function? We’re so pleased to have so many different ones represented.

How can we enable you to do your best work, knowing that this is such complicated but important work? We so salute people who are willing to run toward those challenges.

Rob mentioned how prevalent DEIB goals were in our 2020 research. As we’ve picked back up in 2023 there are a few common themes that we noticed. The first is, as Rob mentioned, this idea of the ongoing ethical and moral commitment to DEIB.

We also saw a lot of creativity and persistence where people were talking about the fact that now that they’re three years down the road from those initial interviews, what’s been happening in this sort of context where we would not have been able to foresee what the political and judicial environment looks like to the extent that it has developed, and then also looking at institutional specificity around how people talk about DEIB, what it means, what are the philosophies that underpin how an institution thinks about that in its strategic planning.

It was really, really interesting and I’m so glad that Rob talked about how inspiring it was for us to hear about these ethical and moral commitments.

One of the things looking back on that 2020 research that’s really interesting for us is to note how many of the chancellors and presidents we interviewed at that time were women or were people of color. But across the institutions that we met, this is such a powerful force. This is such a motivator and in many of their cases is tied to the very reason that their institutions exist in the first place.

This was such a powerful thing and to know that they’re holding on to that, really focusing in on that idea of commitment, saying, “This is something that we are holding dear and we’re going to move forward regardless of challenge.” That is so important, especially as you’re thinking about what makes a strategic plan strategic.

Rob mentioned the idea of changing behavior. Change in behavior requires a commitment. And so articulating the connections between a strong strategic plan and also a strong DEIB focus has been really important to this research. 

And Rob mentioned the chancellor of University of the West, his idea that diversity is everybody’s job. One of the things that we really loved in their plan in 2020 is how bold their vision was and how complete their vision was for thinking about DEIB for all of their constituents.

We also heard at that time that people were starting to pick up the language of the plan. Three years down the road, he’s confirming people are using the language of the plan to talk about what the University’s goals are. They’ve been so successful that they actually are picking up whole new sets of challenges. And they’re becoming involved in statewide DEIB efforts—ones that don’t even necessarily pertain specifically to their university community—because they’re developing such a reputation for their skill and confidence in this matter.

One other thing that we really want to highlight here is the quote where we have, “Diversity is everybody’s job.” We so often hear in interviews about this that the strategic plan progress depends on the success of a team, but one of the things that matters when you are on a team is that you have a responsibility in your role as a teammate.

Seeing that responsibility is one of the things that that Chancellor is very focused on.

At another institution that we call New Center University, one of the things that they talked about is they’re making incredible strides. They have this incredibly dynamic president who has teamed up with a VP for institutional assessment and they are this incredible team keeping tabs on how the university is moving forward.

They’re also trying to be really creative. One of the things that she told us is now three years down the road they’re making this great progress but they do have a group of folks on campus who are not oriented in the same direction they are, but it’s not an option to not work with them.

So managing the relationship with folks who aren’t necessarily as interested in making progress Is going to be part of the deal.

They have a very specific goal for themselves to become a Hispanic-Serving Institution and they are making progress in that regard. Their Hispanic student population is growing in the right direction. They see that and they’re not ready to rest on their laurels. They want to keep using that to move forward even when they can be challenged.

And one of the things that we really appreciated about the way that they’re thinking about that is thinking about what are some of the very practical ways that you can institute and work toward inclusion and equity. For them, one of the great programs that they’ve developed is an outreach program to students who stopped out and invited them back to the university to complete a degree and say, you know, “You have this within your reach. This is a thing that you can do.” And in order to make that possible, one of the things that they’ve done is to clear small bursar bills. When you work with a population of students who are not wealthy who don’t have a lot of money, a lot of times something that might look small to someone else, that can be the barrier to graduation.

They’re thinking about, “How is it that we bring folks back in, so that we show them that we want them here and that we get them to where they want to go?”

We also appreciate the language of “stopping out” that they’re using versus something like “dropping out,” because “stopping out” implies that your students are making decisions with the best information that they have in front of them. They’re not just quitting. “Stopping” entails that you can start and restart. It is not a permanent situation. You can be brought back to complete your degree.

Another thing that we were thinking about as this research was unfolding and as we’re trying to pay attention to what that political and judicial context is, one of the other things that’s happening here is that lots of campuses since 2020- institutions have hired more chief diversity officers or given new visibility to those roles. One of the things that we wrote about in the report is that the length of tenure in those roles has been going down and so in 2021 that was 1.8 years as an average tenure in those roles. There can be a lot of churn, because there is so much heavy-duty work that has to happen with that focus. It was also important for us to think about the role of Chief Diversity Officers here because they often oversee their own version of a strategic plan, one that might apply to their unit, which then informs a current strategic plan or one that is in formation. There is often a very close relationship between what is happening in a division of diversity, equity and inclusion, however that nomenclature works, and what the larger institutional priorities are—they inflect each other very closely.

We also do note, as well, with some other conversations that we’ve had in other parts of our work and also in terms of thinking about our own internal professional development meeting with folks like Dr. Khalilah Shabazz, who is the Chief Diversity Officer at Butler University, and Dr. Andrea Blackman, who is the Chief Diversity Officer for the City of Nashville, what we hear is how much alignment is necessary—unity of purpose between folks of all functions and leadership positions banding together to give their support to that. 

Now, one of the things that was really interesting—Volente University is a Midwestern public university—we met the president in 2020. He gave us that quote about inclusive excellence, “We can’t be, if we’re not inclusive, we can’t be excellent.” Coming back to that, one of the things that was interesting to hear in our discussion with him in 2023 is, “What are you doing on a campus to make sure that you can have some really difficult conversations about what your priorities are?” knowing that there is a lot of times a lot of external scrutiny on universities right now—higher ed is always subject to external scrutiny—but right now that’s so much more pitched and can feel so consequential.

Now, one of the things that he talked about is that their campus follows the Chicago Principles and not using “traditional” DEIB categories in thinking about how they craft their approach to inclusiveness and we really wanted to dig into what that means.

Here, we’ve excerpted some of the language of the Chicago Principles specifically around how you have difficult conversations on campus. One of the things that we want to point out here is that this situates responsibility for conversations and debate within individuals, not on the level of the institution. It is up to individuals to decide which conversations they’ll partake in and to offer vociferous disagreement if there is something that they disagree with that is in the discourse.

This is one way of thinking about or trying to manage what is that external influence when you have folks coming on to campus having conversations or giving presentations? What is the role of the community as it comprises individuals? Thinking about how they’re going to approach those conversations and that vigorous conversation is how we’re going to work these things out.

We also wanted to look at the definition of inclusiveness that they were using at Volente. This is an institution that, the story goes, tried three times to get off the ground and it was created specifically to bring rural populations access to higher ed. Once it finally got off the ground, that mission, that missional charter, has been really fundamental.

You can see here in this idea of inclusiveness that diversity of opinion is included. But there’s also this idea that we really appreciate here, which is you get the sense of a lot of activity, that there’s a lot of conversation, a lot of work happening. But that inclusiveness is also the highest priority and the foundation so that everything that happens at the university should be wrapped in work around creating an inclusive community.

We wanted to get a sense of what other ways people think about inclusiveness as an example because this is a word that people use—they may not necessarily talk about diversity in strategic plans—but they will tend to use inclusion language more frequently. A lot of the plans that we’ve seen cite the AAC&U and their definition of inclusion here and the highlighted parts here about intentionally bringing together diverse groups “actively connecting” and “engaging” them and working for a particular outcome, which is developing an “active and just community,” You get the sense that this is something that requires consistent maintenance, consistent effort, and that it is goal directed.

That’s really important because a lot of times, sometimes, if you see strategic plans and they sometimes talk about diversity, one of the things that they might talk about is bringing different people into contact with each other and then expecting mere exposure to do the work of bringing people into engagement with each other. But you need a lot more intentionality than that and so it’s interesting to see how Volente’s plan weaves together the idea of, you know, individual engagement through the Chicago Principles, but also weaving together this institutional commitment to inclusivity.

[Let’s look at] another university, New Ignatian University, which is a religiously affiliated one.

And for those of you who are new to our research, we are using pseudonyms here for some of these institutions. One of our interviewees asked for that in 2020 and because some of the conversations that we had dealt with these, you know, kind of intimate community discussions. We were really happy to do that. New Ignatian has been a really interesting case here for thinking about this added layer of what happens if you have a religious philosophy that shapes your institution. What does that mean for you? 

And so our conversation with this president was interesting because he talks about how the way that they understand diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging actually comes not out of sort of American higher ed discourse per se, but out of the way that their religious charter thinks about the ways that humans come into the world, the ways that they exist, their being and how we recognize all of the different forms that that can take. And so one of his points in bringing this up is that he really wants especially faculty on his campus who think about educating students in the language of social justice—what else are you doing for them? If we’re recruiting students to our university, what is the material gain that we hope will come out of the education that they get with us? We are doing this to provide material outcomes for them. And one of his points was, you know, it’s great, it’s fine, to talk about the language of social justice, but are you then also inviting students into your professional networks? What are you doing to actually get them the things that they need to live a good life after graduation? When he talks about underserving underrepresented students, kind of out of habit, not necessarily out of intent, that’s the kind of thing that he’s talking about.

Now it was interesting for us in the course of these conversations to hear that DEIB discourse can be positioned as “traditional” and then there is this “heterodox” position which is non-traditional and with the religious example there with New Ignatian you can think about, you know, “traditional” and “orthodoxy” sort of overlapping as important categories.

But it was interesting to think about, okay, so what does that mean for this language to be considered traditional when it can still feel pretty radical to be working for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging? We wanted to think about, what is it that “tradition” even is? On one level a tradition is just something that is worth keeping and we actually engage in processes of traditionalization. So over time, as you consistently use language habitually as you engage in particular behaviors, those things can become traditionalized. And it’s a really kind of empowering process to think about that through that lens. So when you select language at your institution, you are creating a tradition. You are also locating your philosophy, your language, your actions, within a larger tradition.

And one of the things that he also talked about was the idea that when you are recruiting a diverse student population to a university, the categories that you use are not necessarily reflective of all the ways that students might show up on campus or all the different kinds of identities that they claim. So the point there is that oftentimes in the United States, we’re using categories for race, ethnicity, gender, etc, that develop out of an American history over the long term and then how that interacts with our contemporary politics. And as we export our pop culture to other places, our categories become more known, but they don’t necessarily fit everything. 

So there’s an idea lurking in this idea of heterodoxy or in not using traditional DEIB discourse that they may cause us to overlook some of the ways in which people appear or forms of diversity that we may not realize because they’re not already present in a particular category.

And so I want to give you a non-higher ed example for thinking about this. This comes from research that I did as an academic where some of my research interests were on bilingual education. There is a Midwestern town that had a two-way immersion program in Spanish and English in this particular program that meant that ideally 50% of the academic content would be in both Spanish and English. So it was in essence the English as a Second Language program for students who came from Spanish-speaking households. And then there was a lottery system for choosing English speakers. But the actual classroom comprised people who came from all kinds of linguistic and ethnic backgrounds.

One of the students had parents that were from India and China. And so what was interesting about this particular program is in these classrooms, it’s easy to assume that students might select themselves into groups according to things like language, like ethnicity, but what actually happened is that they were really interested in who is a soccer fan and who’s a lucha libre fan and your identity category fell along your fandom and that sort of directed you in terms of your relationships with other students in your classroom and then outside the classroom in an English-medium school where everybody else was doing schooling only in English. 

And what’s important here is that the construction of this program is very intentional. It presupposes the existence of particular kinds of categories of students that will be joining that program. However, it is not necessarily as intentional about understanding what happens when students are together, how they come to understand themselves and how they understand what identity means and the fact that our identities are negotiations. There are things that we assert about ourselves. There are ways that people respond to us or attribute particular identity categories to us. And then different parts of our identity are salient at different moments in our engagements with others. And so for colleges and universities, what this should remind us is that we can think about, what are the particular ways in which we want to create belonging? But do we also then understand in a very clear way what actually happens with experience for students and for employees? This gets back to that really honest reckoning that Rob was talking about that we saw in the most strategic plan.

This is a reminder that we need to keep thinking about which of those categories are important, what happens with them when they’re interacting. Preparing for strategic planning, one of the things that we know is good advice is: don’t spend too much time planning to plan. But as you get ready to think about that or as you’re thinking, you know, we already have a plan that’s been activated and we want to know, how do we check in? How do we get a sense of whether we need to change direction? 

These are some questions that you can ask and one of the great ways to get started there is to think about what kinds of messaging your institution is putting out. What are the ways that people get to know you? How are you talking to them about who you are as a community? And so thinking across all of your messaging from enrollment to advancement to your diversity marketing, all of that stuff. Across all of your channels, really take a good look at who’s present there, who speaks, who gets something like a quote attributed to them, who has a voice, who’s present? How do you engage with their identity categories or how do you decide when it’s important to point to them?

These are all really, really important things to do. And one good way to use these materials is to bring them into a working group. If you are getting ready to plan or you’re thinking about student success, [if] we want to focus on student success, what is the role of inclusivity and belonging in student success in our institution? Putting those materials out in front of your community members is a really good way to gauge what the needs are because they will start talking. And in our 2020 research, our graduate student intern, Connor LaGrange, read all of these plans with us and looked at them and said, “You know, as a student, I don’t see myself in a lot of these plans at all. They wouldn’t know who I am or what I need.” And one of the most fundamental things that you must do is understand what life is like, what that lived experience is like for your community members. This is a good way to get those conversations going—what are the sorts of daily needs that might get overlooked—and, then, to also help you track your progress as you activate a plan.

We noted that in our strategic plan research: there are all different ways that you can think about DEIB from a very holistic perspective. And in 2020, these are just some of the ways that we saw that. So there’s some that are sort of obvious things, around demography, thinking about curricular design, thinking about pedagogy, but there are also a lot of ways of thinking about your physical plant. How do we create access? How do we really understand the way that humans use this space around them? Are there ways that we can make those more amenable to humans gathering and learning together? 

Alumni relations and advancement is another relationship people are thinking about. How do we really welcome our alumni into a relationship with us on an ongoing basis? What does that look like from a really holistic perspective?

And then, you know, one of the things that we’ll talk about in just a second is faculty, staff and administration work life. This is becoming such a prevalent category of DEIB and strategic planning and it’s absolutely critical.

Then there’s this question, how are we even supposed to talk about all of these things? I mean, one of the things that we’ve seen on LinkedIn is you get these threads where people are talking about what is the language at this institution. As people compare, one of the questions that inevitably comes up is, do we call it diversity? Do we call it equity? Is it justice? Does it matter what language we use, or is it just the work that matters?

We say it all matters. In order to have coherence, in order to have a unified vision, to understand what your values are, to understand how your strategic plan articulates with your mission, you must have a shared vocabulary and shared understandings about what those words mean. That can be shaped by the particular context in which you live. Institutions in places where there’s a lot of anti-DEIB legislation might need to take a different approach than other institutions, but it all matters and the language and culture angle where you bring language and work together is where really really important work happens.

We would suggest, I mean, we’re gonna talk through some alternative language in just a second. There’s a lot of value in having a really good conversation about what the language should look like and not taking that bit for granted. Here are some examples of language and plans where they weren’t necessarily using terms like diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

The language that they’re using might be used to not trigger people to pay so much attention to DEIB, where it can feel like, you know, certain words like diversity and inclusion can invite scrutiny. They also tend to reflect things that people understand as generally good outcomes, like access, affordability, student success, supportive community.

They’re pretty wide ranging. They don’t necessarily speak to DEIB specifically until you then marry them with some actions and some metrics that let you get really real about what it looks like to create access, to create affordability. 

Sustainability is an interesting one there, too. We’re seeing that more often as institutions are trying to navigate talking about financial sustainability and also, ecological and environmental sustainability, knowing that climate change, also becomes an equity issue. So these are all sort of like sets of alternative vocabularies. They’re also an alternative way to kind of get, to get the conversation going and to give you a way to frame your goals and actions toward the things that you really want to do if you can’t use language around DEIB.

Now, with that said, we do think there is a lot of value when you are able to use words like that to continue to do that. They do matter. And as we were talking about with traditionalization, you are invoking a very powerful lineage. When you use those words, you are positioning your behaviors and your activities within a history of transformation and change that really matters.

So let’s talk about some examples from some plans. So here from a Historically Black University’s strategic plan published in the last year. You can see there’s talk about individual difference, a “culture of opinion.” Now this can sound like language from the Chicago Principles.

One of the things that’s really interesting here is that it doesn’t necessarily go directly into strong theoretical DEIB language. But with the references to collective action, collective strength, collective wisdom, one of the things that it tells us is that with individuals who are having conversations, the goal is to be able to take action as a group rather than wait and see what the effects are of a bunch of aggregate individual decisions and conversations. So it’s a slightly different framing where it still puts emphasis on individuals to participate and to engage in difficult conversations, but it is for reaching a collective purpose.

Here’s another example from a Western land-grant university. And one of the things that Rob was talking about earlier is, you know, strategic plans that take these really clear looks at institutional history. One of the things that they do is sometimes grapple with moments when an institution has had a role or been touched by some kind of historical moment. And so for this, which talks about the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, one of the things that they’re talking about is the fact that the land upon which a land-grant university sits may be dispossessed from local Native American populations. In order to provide this higher education opportunity, loss was created. And what is the legacy of that? What is the role of the university in addressing that? And so for this institution, one of the things that they’re grappling with is there’s this form of dispossession and there are other forms of marginalization that make up our institutional history and our national history.

What are we to do about that? And so you can see that as part of their strategic plan, they are looking through the lens of: how do we create access, opportunity, things of that nature as a corrective against some of these historical processes?

And here is some language from a plan that is incredibly forthright and that actually touches on something that’s really interesting going back to thinking about the language of this. Words like diversity, equity, inclusion, they can sort of have this theoretical weight to them right there.

There’s a lot of theory, there’s a lot of scholarly work about them. People don’t always necessarily know what they mean. They’re not sure how you get from that to the actual, practical application, to what the concrete action is, that is effected for members of any of your constituent groups. And here, this is a really interesting melding of those: talking about providing a “radically inclusive, international and welcoming campus” using the language of “trauma-informed” approaches. But really what’s clear here is that they are trying to find a path forward to where they understand these theoretically important concepts: why they matter and then what are the actual, practical applications of that. What’s important here, too, is we know that things that create belonging, things like taking a holistic wellness perspective, understanding your community, those things actually benefit everyone, not just folks who are marginalized, right?

Creating an environment of belonging is so critical, but talking about how you do that, making sure that you have the ability to use the language and then to show how that’s going to actually work in practical application is absolutely essential.

And we mentioned the idea that faculty and staff are becoming really important in this work. We’ve noticed over the last three years this trend toward talking about work as “meaningful.” What does it mean to have a meaningful work life? Or to have a place, an institution, that is a best or great place to work.

The meaningful work idea is based in the idea that if you give people the tools and the training to do their job, if you give them appropriate feedback, if they understand why their job is important, that means that they have a meaningful work life, but that has ramifications outside of work. So if you are invested in people having a good life more generally, you understand that the folks that work for you and with you deserve to have a work life that amplifies their ability to feel good across their lives.

And here you can see some elements of that, for instance, welcoming people in. So giving them a pathway into a career that doesn’t necessarily fit some predetermined trajectory and understanding that an employee may be with you for one moment in time, but you have the ability to enable them toward creation of a meaningful life even after they leave your institution.

So they are meeting you on one point of the journey and you can cultivate a great journey the rest of the way for them, whether they’re with you or not.

Wellness is also important. So on that list of sort of alternative terms like access and affordability, health and wellness was one of those really important things. And we know, especially with burnout, with things like that happening, thinking about things like faculty and staff wellness, employee engagement has become equally as important an issue as thinking about student health and wellness. And that’s all really, really important because it is when we are healthy that we are most able to attend to the needs of our communities. This is another way in which that value clarification that Rob talked about has been really important in recent strategic plans, because selecting understanding health and wellness, a healthy community and culture as an institutional value then gives you the ability to write that into your strategic plan and to tie that into the actual expectations that you have for folks as part of their professional development.

Rob 

So as we wrap up, we want to be sure and emphasize one of our foundational and guiding principles at RHB, and that is coherence that guides our work. And we think it also provides a useful way to think about the work that you’re doing as well and to work through and think about these three foundational questions.

And if you know the answers to these questions and if you were to triangulate those answers, would they be in alignment? Would there be coherence, and Aimee talked about this first one. What is true about your institution? What is the actual lived experience, what students are experiencing? What your faculty and your staff members are experiencing? And then how does that align with what your institution says is true about itself? 

And this often becomes a point of tension when we work specifically with marketing and communications divisions and offices, and the issue of how an institution is representing its diversity. Is it true? Or is it aspirational? And if it were, if they were where they would want it to be, and they’re talking about their aspirations, but yet they need to be truthful and not misrepresent and have the experience not, not living up to the promise that they’re conveying in their, in their materials or their communications.

But yet if they’re in that position, how do they convey that they are making progress, or how do they show their efforts, or they may not be where they want to be, but how do they communicate the progress that they’re making?

And then number three, is there alignment between what is true and what others think is true. What are those perceptions and those expectations of audiences that matter most to your institution? 

So before we get to the Q&A, and we’ll be interested in your comments and your questions, a quick note that we will follow up next week with all of these webinar materials for you. In addition to the recording and the slides from today, we’ll send you each of the three installments from our 2023 research, so that you can access and peruse these directly. And these first two here, that’s what we focused on in the September webinar. So you can go back and see some of the other themes that we found in new strategic plans. One of the items that encouraged us is we’re seeing greater focus in new plans for example. 

But again, to close us out, we are grateful for your interest in this research, and we certainly commend your efforts and the important work that you’re doing to move your institution forward. If we can ever lend an ear or a hand to guide, to help, to support the work that you’re doing, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And if you have more questions about the research and what we found after today, we are happy to have a conversation with you or share anything that we can from our study that would be helpful to you in your work, or if there are other things that you want to find out or more research as we think about continuing our strategic planning research. So with that, oh, go ahead, Aimee, please.

Aimee

Yes, thank you. Just wanted to say thank you again and to everyone and We really hope that we have planted some seeds that will bear fruit, especially when it comes to work like this when it’s so complicated. You’re not necessarily going to see the outcome of that immediately.

And yet you have to persist. We hope that what we’ve given you is some inspiration, some fertile ground to plant those seeds, into the future.