When Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden took on her newly created job this month at the University of Maryland’s flagship College Park campus, she assumed a challenge at the school with a lot riding on her shoulders — helping the University of Maryland strengthen its diversity efforts and, thus, its relevance to the state in the future and standing among the nation’s major research and teaching institutions.
As associate vice president and chief diversity officer at the College Park, Md., institution just outside the nation’s capital, with 37,000 students and 10,000 employees, Shorter-Gooden will be Maryland President Wallace Loh’s top aide in charge of giving day-to-day meaning to the school’s ambitious 10-year strategic plan for diversity.
“The university has made a lot of headway over the past few decades,” Shorter-Gooden says, noting the University of Maryland’s steady gains in student diversity, retention and achievement. “The (10-year strategic) plan is exemplar,” she says. “But the plan has to be implemented,” she adds, noting there is much work to be done, much building to do on the gains of the past.
A key element of Shorter-Gooden’s charge will be helping Maryland develop, execute and sustain a solid plan for better recruitment and retention of tenured and tenure-track women and people of color. To illustrate the challenge, academic observers note that fewer than 200 members of Maryland’s nearly 1,500 tenured and tenure-track faculty are Black. Shorter-Gooden, a Washington, D.C., native who spent 20 years on the West Coast before starting her Maryland assignment, acknowledges that taking on a major role at a major public university “is a big transition.” Her most recent post was that of associate provost for international-multicultural initiatives at Alliant International University, a significantly smaller private college in Southern California.
“I’ll have to get used to being in the public eye,” Shorter-Gooden says. “On the other hand, it really means my work and the work of the university is really anchored in the community. You have to be more accountable. Your actions are being scrutinized more.”
Pioneering ways
Shorter-Gooden has a rich personal history of taking on and mastering big challenges. She and others note that Shorter-Gooden, the daughter of public school teachers in the District of Columbia, was one of two Black girls to integrate the prestigious Madeira School, a private girls prep school in Virginia. After graduating from Madeira, she earned her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in 1973 from Princeton University with its first class of women.
