Monday, April 12, 2010

Advisory Board for the Office of Equity and Diversity

Update for Advisory Board for the Office of Equity and Diversity:

Meeting date: 03/26/2010

Main discussions:

- Chancellor Martin and Damon Williams, the vice provost for diversity and climate, are working on defining the university's visions on equity and diversity. This advisory board is interested to know what this vision is. Therefore, we are planning to invite Chancellor and the vice provost to one of our meetings so that we are all in the same page.

- We are also planning to invite other persons involved with diversity issues around campus to get their input and understand where they are at.

- WISELI (Women In Science & Engineering Leadership) will be holding 2 days workshops for faculty in 90 departments. The workshop is aimed to make faculty aware of unconscious biases that every person has in order to prevent these biases. There was discussion on that teaching assistants are not included, and where do they fit in terms of diversity workshops.

- WISELI also provides another kind of workshops called "Climate workshops" which targets department chairs and tries to make them aware of approaches that they can take in order to improve the climate in their department. Here is an interesting presentation regarding this subject: http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/docs/Present_STS_Sheridan_2010.pdf

- There were also discussions on that it is important that faculty get these trainings. However, these are not mandatory. We also discussed some of the issues that arises for students hired by the faculty that are not fully aware of what they should expect from their employees and how to treat them.

*WISELI Web site: http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/ You can register to be a member of this organization and get E-mails on the workshops that they provide for the students.

Posted by: Fatemah Panahi

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The Associated Students of Madison Shared Governance Committee Blog serves as a space for shared governance appointees and the UW-Madison student body to communicate on issues relating to shared governance. As part of their responsibilities as student representatives, appointees will post a report following each meeting attended.