The way Cynthia Love sees it, colleges and universities need more than just a climate survey to really improve diversity on campus.
“You have to have something you’re going to do after you have that information,” said Love, executive director of American College Personnel Association—College Student Educators International. “Otherwise it’s just checking a box.”
Love made her remarks during an interview that followed ACPA’s recent gathering to present the organization’s Global Diversity & Inclusion Benchmark tool (GDIB) as being available for the first time in its 10-year history to colleges and universities.
Several institutions of higher learning — including Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri — are beginning to use the GDIB, a free online downloadable 80-page booklet, according to Love. It is sponsored by The Diversity Collegium.
Love’s hope is that eventually 12 percent of colleges and universities use the tool to bring about more diversity and inclusion on campus.
“We need at least 12 percent of our campuses nationwide to begin some part of this process for this to move into a level of adoption across all of higher education,” Love said. “There are all kinds of different initiatives that go on in higher education. And in the absence of that critical mass, they die.”
The GDIB — which is available here — addresses a wide range of operations within an organization, Love said. For instance, a chart shows that it deals with 14 broad categories. They range from vision and leadership at the foundation level, to social responsibility and student recruitment at the external level, to recruitment and compensation at the internal level.
