Bringing the ACUPA Conference Home

At last year’s ACUPA conference, I attended a session called “What Have We Been Missing? Adding Equity Review to Our Policy Process,” presented by Michele Gross from the University of Minnesota. Michele presented information about UM’s “equity lens” facet of their policy review process in which policies are evaluated for unforeseen, undue burdens for groups who have experienced exclusion and/or discrimination. The presentation was informative and thought provoking. I returned to my campus motivated to implement something similar. This post describes the process of realizing this change on my campus. 

By way of context, I work at a college of almost 13,000 students with the only student demographic majority being women. Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) is also relatively new, founded in 2005, and serves large populations of first-generation, immigrant, and students of color. We have approximately 600 faculty and 400 staff. Our policy process involves the following stages: 

1.      Informal review by me 

2.      Informal review (which we call coordination) by senior leadership 

3.      Final reviews by our Legal Affairs team and me 

4.      Final approval by the president’s cabinet.  

Despite a growing level of diversity among our faculty and administration, many faculty and administrators are from different demographic groups than our students. Our policy process is relatively streamlined, which has many advantages, but the equity review presentation I attended highlighted one of the disadvantages: A potentially narrow view of the impact of our policies, made even more possible when creators and reviewers of policies aren’t members of the groups potentially impacted by the policies.  

Consequently, when I returned from the conference, I began plans to pilot test an equity review stage in our policy review process. After assembling a proposal describing logistics and potential benefits, I met with my supervisor and her supervisor (then, the president’s chief of staff). They were both on board quickly and the idea was presented to the president’s cabinet for their feedback. Because the cabinet is the final approver of all policies and provides oversight for the policy process itself, their support was necessary. They agreed to a pilot test of the idea, so I updated our policy review flowchart and created a memo outlining the process and the reasons behind it. After some discussion, the equity review stage was inserted early in the process, between my informal review and senior leadership coordination. I also assembled a team of campus officials with responsibilities with relevant groups who would compose our equity review team. Because our campus is relatively new and leanly staffed, we don’t have many of the cultural centers that other campuses do. Here is our current equity review team and, where not obvious, the groups for which they review: 

• Associate Dean for Advising Programs: Students receiving mentoring for academic renewal or enhancement 
• Executive Director for Diversity and Equity Compliance: Groups covered under federal EEO and Title IX policy 
• Veterans Success Manager 
• Executive Director of Financial Aid Services: Pell Grant recipients and other low income students 
• Director of Disability Services 
• Senior Associate Vice President, Student Affairs: A wide variety of other student groups that don’t currently have dedicated staff, such as LGBTQIA+, returning students, etc. 

After identifying the group, I met with them to gauge their interest and invite their suggestions about maximizing the success of the group. All agreed that equity review would provide a beneficial level of review and potentially provide them with a professional development opportunity to become more involved with policy creation and review.   

If you’ve managed any type of organizational change, you know how strongly institutional context and timing influence its success, and our equity review implementation was no different. In particular, a series of staffing changes created an environment conducive to success, although this could have easily had the opposite effect. In the past year, a new president and four new VPs (two in newly created divisions) have been hired and three new deans (out of seven total) have either been hired or are in the final hiring stages. This has led to a slow-down in normal policy review activity, but also created fertile ground for new ideas to take root, since the entire campus was in change mode. 

The equity review team has reviewed a few policies and we are still in the early stages of implementing equity review, but every sign so far has been positive. I have every reason to believe that it will become a permanent feature of our policy review process. We are currently exploring the addition of staff who work with international students and athletes to the equity review team.  

For anyone interested in making such a change, I highly recommend UM’s equity lens website and Michele’s presentation from the 2019 conference and the webinar she and her colleagues presented last week, both available under Resources on ACUPA’s website. Additionally, tying the effort to campus culture and traditions strengthens its chance of success, and most campuses have a mission or vision statement or some other foundational document that describes the institution’s commitment to diversity that can add support to the effort. A variety of administrative units, such as those whose staff work with underrepresented groups, also may be engaged to build a coalition of support for anyone wanting to implement such a change on their campus.