Diversity Town Hall Meetings
Comments and Feedback from Participants
April 6, 2010 (Student Center East)
- UIC was founded 11 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
- Why was it important for campus to have conversation on diversity?
- These ideals of the thinking document need to keep evolving. It starts at the top; respect needed of underlings; vice chancellors need to be made aware and be directed to follow this study.
- A new Board of Trustees will have a public conversation about diversity.
- What aspect of report will have biggest impact? Answers: staffing, dialogue will help coordinate efforts across campus; identify leadership, promote human dignity and intellectual diversity, permanent Office of Diversity.
- Students feel safe about diversity here but not once they graduate and work in a world that does not honor diversity. What can be done about the larger community?
- In the Study Abroad program students are forced to look at their identity. Conversations go on beyond campus, the international factor.
- Challenge in engagement of diverse campus-how do we get students to know each other?
- Administration is not valuing diversity, needs to honor modeling, adjust faculty hiring practices.
- What have we not brought to the surface? We have to think of ourselves as a community.
- Speaker noted an article she read: The more diverse, the less the attempt to work together.
- UIC has zero school spirit. If we were to develop school spirit then we would be identified with UIC.
- Community building is needed in the report.
- The process has helped me to explore other areas, expanding the academy’s report.
- How do we make faculty more diverse? We need to sell UIC.
- The thinking process is very important because people change in the process, making the process an outcome.
- Many students find their identity at UIC, Asian Americans for example.
- Trust is missing in deciding on a definition. Increase the pie rather than share the pie.
- I disagree with the sentence in the document that says,” If discrimination and injustice had not existed or did not persist, active diversity initiatives like ours would not be necessary.”
- Trust and fairness depend on each other.
- Which of our programs have students working together?