A Blueprint for Transformation
Senate Committee on Equity, Access, and Diversity
November 2005

The defining mission of a research university is the development, critique, and communication of knowledge and ideas. In this context, a commitment to equity, access, and diversity means recognizing that

• development of knowledge and ideas requires the intelligence and imagination of people with a diverse range of life experiences and social and cultural backgrounds;
• critique, if it is to be rigorous, depends on subjecting ideas to scrutiny by people diversely related to the objects of study and differently affected by research into them; and
• communication of knowledge and ideas depends on trust, which is earned by respectful engagement and a readiness to learn as well as to teach.

Public research universities need fundamental transformation in order to succeed in the 21^st century. As a public, land-grant university in a major metropolitan area, the University of Minnesota is well positioned to address this need by making equity, access, and diversity integral to its definition of excellence.

Putting Principles into Practice

1. The conditions of work in all job classifications need to reflect the specific character and values of a research university, including a commitment to recognizing, supporting, valuing, and rewarding intelligence and creativity on the part of all members of the University community.

2. Respecting and valuing diversity in teaching, learning, and research require recognizing that intelligence and creativity are inseparable from specific life experiences and culturally distinctive ways of thinking about and engaging with the world. Students and faculty should feel encouraged to think and speak as the whole people that they are, without a priori limits on allowable sources of insight and useful critique.

3. Admission standards must reflect the needs of a research university committed to transformation through diversity, by recruiting and supporting students from diverse racial/ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. We need to learn about, develop, and implement standards for admission that will select students with the ability and commitment to draw on those backgrounds as they share in the work of discovery and critique.

4. Any plans for an all-university honors college should focus on the students who can best contribute to the goal of transformation through diversity. They would be selected less for their success at meeting the demands of education as we currently know it than for their commitment to and promise for making change, including mentoring of children from their home communities.

5. Graduate student support allocations should reflect the crucial contribution diversity makes to a graduate program and to research. This recognition underlies the mission of the DOVE fellowships: “Diversity of Views and Experiences” shifts the focus from providing access to welcoming challenge, innovation, and transformation.

6. Civic engagement needs to move from the optional margins to the recognition of the interdependencies we all have, within the University and beyond it, and of the responsibilities that flow from them. Such recognition requires us to attend to how our own work affects the work and lives of diverse other individuals and communities and to take responsibility for building and guarding the trust on which the university’s research and teaching missions depend and which is earned only by respectful engagement.