Dive Brief:
- Campus culture cannot be changed from one day to the next in response to student demands, so pre-empting protests requires long-term, committed work by college and university leaders.
- Ricardo Azziz writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education that presidents and chancellors have the power to set a campuswide tone for an open dialogue, determine priorities around diversity and inclusion, and allocate resources based on those priorities.
- Azziz says leaders can change the culture of inclusiveness but “they must genuinely believe there is both a problem and a solution,” be willing to talk about the issues before a crisis, prioritize the necessary steps in response, support the development of a strategic plan, and make sure it has the money and expertise to be carried out.
Dive Insight:
Dionardo Pizana, a diversity and personnel specialist at Michigan State University Extension and a former associate dean of students for minority and international students at Adrian College in Michigan, similarly advises college and university leaders to address campus diversity and inclusion issues before protests erupt, when crisis management mode is more likely to co-opt thoughtful, strategic planning.
Besides offering advice for what campus leaders can do, Azziz outlines what campus communities should acknowledge they cannot, including changing campus cultures on their own and being perfectly sensitive and universally inoffensive in every single comment. Everyone makes mistakes.