Mission

The mission of the Center for Multicultural Engagement (CME) is to create and sustain a campus climate in and out of the classroom that values and promotes all forms of diversity. The center challenges students, staff, and faculty to commit to diversity as a source of renewal and vitality that empowers them to change the culture and the world through civic action.

Vision

The CI community is one in which every member intentionally acknowledges, values, and engages diversity in a pluralistic environment of mutually respectful intellectual curiosity and freedom. The CME promotes working toward a just, pluralistic society to end all forms of oppression so that all people engage with respect, equality, and inclusion.

Definitions

Diversity is defined as individual (e.g., personality, language, learning styles, and life experiences) and social (e.g., race, ethnicity, SES, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, sexual identity, age, color, national origin, ability, military status, political and religious affiliations) differences that impact individuals, interpersonal relationships, institutional policies, and our CI campus culture, values, norms, belief systems, and behavioral patterns. Operationalizing the campus value of diversity requires an intentional and ongoing effort to make explicit and implicit biases visible and creating a culture that embraces diversity in all forms and at multiple levels:

  • Internally (personal responsibility within the individual dealing with implicit biases),
  • Interpersonally (relationships individuals have with each other),
  • Institutionally (within organizations created to structure society), and culturally (within the values, norms, belief systems, behavioral patterns, etc. of groups of people).

Multiculturalism means to respectfully coexist with people of different abilities, identities, and/or practices (including ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, national, and/or (non)religious) in an environment of intellectual curiosity, self-reflection, and civic engagement.

Equity is defined as about fairness, access, opportunity and advancement for students, faculty and staff. Improving equity involves increasing justice and fairness within the procedures and processes of institutions or systems, as well as in their distribution of resources. Operationalizing the value of equity requires an understanding of the historical root causes of outcome disparities within our society. And cultivating the habit of asking key questions in the decision-making process and acting with direct, explicit and intentional efforts to raise awareness about fairness and fix university policies and practices that create and worsen inequality for historically underrepresented populations of students, faculty and staff. These includes wins and who loses from these decisions.

CI Learning Environment

In light of recent incidents of harassment and aggression reported at CI and beyond (1), we reaffirm our commitment to creating a learning environment in which students engage in informed discourse and express a diversity of opinions freely and in a civil manner while representing all individuals, particularly their sense of safety. We also endorse President Beck’s admonition to the campus community on November 9, 2016: “At CI, we embrace the fundamental values of equity and inclusion and commit to diversity as a course of renewal, vitality and strength. Our work is critical to the future of our country as we continue to serve a diverse, multicultural, [and international] student body.”

Everyone on the CI campus must adhere to the standards of our community; faculty are stewards of these standards in the classroom. Anyone failing to adhere to these standards in the classroom may be asked to leave. Students, faculty, or staff experiencing behavior on campus that fails to adhere to community standards should report it to the CARE Team and/ or the Title IX and Inclusion Office, or the University Police (Public Safety).

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