Council on Inclusive Excellence is announced

President Lee Pelton announced on February 12 that the former Emerson Diversity Council has been reconfigured and renamed the Council on Inclusive Excellence.

“This initiative affirms our commitment to creating and sustaining a diverse and inclusive community,” Pelton said in a statement. “It also asserts that institutional excellence is not possible without full engagement with diversity—in the demographic makeup of our community, in the curriculum, in the co-curricular experience of students, in the nature of teaching and learning, and in our campus climate.”

The new Inclusive Excellence model requires clear measures of accountability to be established to ensure that progress toward diversity goals is made.

Pelton said the new Council on Inclusive Excellence will now be advisory to the president and will have an expanded membership “to better represent the campus community” by including undergraduate and graduate student representatives.

Additionally, Pelton said senior administrators currently serving on the Diversity Council will become ex-officio members on the new Council and will assume direct responsibility for overseeing the development and implementation of strategic goals related to diversity and inclusion in their respective areas.

The Inclusive Excellence Council will be charged with the following: Guiding the development of goals and measurable outcomes related to inclusive excellence; monitoring and evaluating progress toward identified goals; identifying areas of deficiencies and making recommendations for moving our inclusion excellence efforts forward more effectively; and reporting to the campus community on progress toward identified goals on a regular basis.

Sylvia Spears, vice president for diversity and inclusion, first announced that changes to the Council would be made during a forum for faculty and staff in December.

“Students need to … truly be prepared to be global leaders,” Spears said at the time. “They need to be good global citizens, and we need to be doing things intentionally to create that. The good news is some of that is already happening.”