Categories
projects

Current Practices in Departmental Activities

Project Description

Advancing the department’s mission in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is the responsibility of all stakeholders. In order to move closer towards becoming a fully engaged community, it is necessary to fully understand what practices are currently employed across all aspects of departmental life.

All of chemistry’s standing faculty and staff committees have been tasked with examining current practices and associated resources through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion. There are two main goals of this effort:

  1. to document our DEI practices and collect evidence of their efficacy to better characterize our current departmental climate. This information will be used to identify areas of opportunity for strategic growth and highlight both strengths and weaknesses across current departmental practices.
  2. to provide a concrete opportunity for committees and stakeholders to engage in candid discussion about the ways that DEI impacts all stakeholders and permeates all aspects of departmental life.

The committees undertaking this work are:

  • Graduate Committee
  • Undergraduate Committee
  • Faculty Recruitment and Development Committee
  • Operations Committee

Chemistry sets standing committee membership at the beginning of each school year. All faculty are required to serve on one committee as part of their departmental service. In 2020-2021, there is a DEI working group as well as the standing committees listed above. Under chair Dr. Brian Dyer, the department also has a Leadership Team comprised of the chairs of all committees and the department chair who meet weekly.

Related Resources

Committees have been provided with a resource to help them discuss and record current practices in the context of the department’s DEI goals. In future, this may be available as a community resource. At this time, it is an internal document.

Project Leadership

  • Designing a resource for collecting current practices is a joint effort between the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Chemistry at Emory and the Vice-Chair for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Climate at the University of California at San Diego.
  • The “current practices” audit conducted within Emory’s standing committees is being led by committee chairs/Leadership Team.