UTSA launches President’s Initiative on Inclusive Excellence

(Feb. 27, 2019) -- To advance the goal of creating a campus environment that is welcoming and inclusive to all, UTSA President Taylor Eighmy today announced the President’s Initiative on Inclusive Excellence. This is the next step along the pathway toward promoting an environment where all members of the UTSA community can engage, learn and thrive.

Vice President for Inclusive Excellence Myron Anderson, who joined UTSA in January 2019, has been familiarizing himself with the UTSA community and assessing all of the diversity and inclusion efforts that have brought the university to this point in its journey. These conversations shaped the framework of the President’s Initiative to coordinate efforts moving forward.

Similar to the President’s Initiative on Preventing Sexual Assault and Misconduct launched earlier this month, this initiative will be led by an Inclusive Excellence Advisory Board (IEAB) charged with developing strategic approaches to broadly and systemically enhance the inclusivity of the campus.

Initially, three committees will be established to lead specific efforts within the inclusive excellence spectrum. Eighmy said he expects these committees will evolve as projects come to completion and the groups morph to tackle new ones based on UTSA’s highest needs.

• Cultural Intelligence – This committee is charged with sustaining, increasing and unifying the cultural intelligence of the UTSA community through new platforms enabling faculty, staff and students to acquire additional knowledge and tools for engagement. As a first step, it will work on the implementation of an online professional development training on diversity, inclusion and managing bias.
• Campus Climate – This committee will assess and develop strategies to improve UTSA’s campus climate through data collection and monitoring activities. Its initial project will be to develop and implement a comprehensive campus climate survey at UTSA as a vehicle for identifying critical issues and assessing progress over time. The work of this committee will be done in concert with UTSA’s existing Campus Climate Team, which monitors and facilitates the reporting of bias incidents on campus.
• Inclusive Recruitment – In an effort to increase the recruitment of diverse faculty and staff, this committee will explore and recommend new hiring strategies to advance UTSA’s inclusiveness goals. On the faculty side, this committee will work in tandem with the Provost’s Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative, specifically the Advancing Academic Excellence through Accelerating Faculty Diversity Hiring Program (FDP). On the staff side, it will work with Vice President for Business Affairs Veronica Mendez to coordinate efforts through Human Resources.

In addition to the efforts associated with this initiative, Anderson is setting up the infrastructure for his new Vice Presidential unit. This includes putting mechanisms into place to support campus affinity groups and evolving the existing Diversity and Inclusion website to expand and deepen its capacity as a comprehensive campus resource.

The entire UTSA community is encouraged to contact Anderson or the initiative chairs with questions or thoughts they have regarding their vision for UTSA as a model for inclusive excellence. Anderson’s upcoming listening sessions for students and faculty and staff will provide another opportunity to share thoughts, experiences and ideas on inclusive excellence at UTSA.

“The more we support and contribute to this effort as a learning community, the more momentum it will have,’ said Eighmy.

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