Thank you so much for your note!  My name is Kimberly Griffin, and I'm a member of the project team!  Our next steps are to work with institutions and offer our institutional assessment tool more widely, as well as offer a guidebook that can help campuses jump start institutional action around promoting faculty diversity and inclusion in STEM.  We are also going to critically assess the data we collect through the STEM-OP to determine whether there are particularly successful programs that we can scale at a regional or national level.  You can learn more about our next steps at www.aplu.org/includes .  Thanks for sharing about your project as well - Travis York has been doing some incredible work on our project and is the person to contact about potential collaboration. 

Hi Christopher - thank you for your questions!  I am a member of the project team, and it's been so inspiring to work on this project and try to make progress and address these challenges on a national scale.  Getting everyone on the same page with language has certainly been a challenge - we've realized that we are going to have to provide glossaries with some of our tools just to make sure everyone is clear!  Some of the barriers are consistent with what we know from the literature on increasing faculty diversity - it can be difficult to change multiple levels of institutions, getting buy in and investment from senior leaders, deans, department chairs and faculty (which is where so much of this work will be done).  It also can be tough to break people out of old narratives about why faculty diversity is so stagnant, particularly those that frame faculty from underrepresented backgrounds as somehow deficient or not as talented as their peers.  We've been really inspired by the work of our organizational partners on this project, like the McKnight Foundation, SREB, CIRTL, and the University of California System Office, who have been making great progress and innovating around issues of faculty diversity.  The ADVANCE program also has so many great lessons to offer!

Thank you for responding, Kimberly.  This work will have such an amazing impact on current students/future academics from diverse backgrounds as well.  Access and inclusion seems to be a major issue in many higher education STEM disciplines... perhaps because of such an ingrained traditionalist perspective?  Not to mention we constantly fight to get physical access on the forefront... especially from the older institutions.  Moreso, the intersectionality of disability with another underrepresented identities and creates nothing but an uphill battle for talented current and future faculty.  Keep up the great work!

Thanks for your question!  We are still testing our instruments for the institutional self-assessment; we've gone through multiple rounds of feedback and revision, and we're now at a pilot of the tools.  The STEM-OP is live and can be accessed at https://www.cvent.com/surveys/Welcome.aspx?s=df... We've learned a lot about collective impact for sure - it is a tough process, but really does lead us to generating solutions and ideas that we'd never think of alone.  So I think that one of the main things we've learned is to bring multiple stakeholders to the table as we try to address issues related to faculty diversity.  We've also learned the importance of collaboration - within and across colleges, within systems, and with external organizations.  It's such a big, multidimensional problem - we'll need multidimensional strategies to address it.  More to come!

Hi Pati -

Thanks for the great question.  I am sure that we'd be happy to define terms in person, as necessary.  But given that our project is a national initiative and we want to be sure to give out consistent information, we think that having some core definitions in writing is really important.  But we do hope to create multiple opportunities for institutional teams to engage with each other and with us to ask questions, get support, and generate new ideas.

The link is so odd!  It isn't working for me now, either.  Another way to get to it is through the APLU Includes website (http://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/st...) and click on "Our Projects" in the menu on the left.  The link to the STEM-OP is in the text in the center of the page.

Hi Gretal!  I really liked your video - such a great project.  Yes, I do think that the tool could be adapted for departments.  It was developed for institutional teams to engage in, but we tried to develop questions that reflect work and initiatives as the institutional, college, and departmental levels.  I think that if an institution wanted to use the tool just to focus on questions for their department, they would be focusing on departmental commitments, culture, and climate, rather than at the institutional level.  They are distinct, but certainly related.

Hello Aliyah,   Thank you for checking out our video and project!  We're so excited to hear about your passion and interest in STEM - and I hope you'll consider a career in academia ... As we say in our  video, it's hard to be what you cannot see.  As such, we believe it is essential to make our STEM faculty adopting inclusive teaching, advising, and research mentoring practices as well as becoming more diverse themselves! THANK YOU SO MUCH!