CDM Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategic Plan

This plan, developed during the 2020-21 academic year, is in progress.

In the wake of recent national conversations around anti-Black racism, sexual violence, the immigration crisis, and impact of the pandemic of marginalized people, the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media is more awake to the systemic inequities and injustices in our institutions, including our university and our college. We invite our community members of students, alumni, staff and faculty to join us to:

• fight to interrogate and dismantle these unjust and inequitable systems;
• listen to those silenced and marginalized voices in our communities;
• and remake those broken practices of our institutions.

To these ends, we leaders of CDM, in alliance with those disempowered members of our own college community, are currently working to:

• Train the privileged members of our community through workshops and guest speakers in order to ally with and better support our marginalized members.
• Hold listening sessions for students, faculty and staff to share their stories, to highlight our institution’s systemic problems, and to imagine solutions.
• Change its hiring, promotion, and retention practices to reflect better the diversity and needs for representation of our students, faculty and staff.
• Revise our curricula away from inherently biased or explicitly oppressive programs, degrees or courses, and towards more inclusive, equitable and empowering offerings.
• Provide mentorship and support to those members in our community who may be marginalized by the same institutions in which they learn, serve or work.
• Establish and support working faculty and staff committees and advise student groups whose work aligns with anti-racism, anti-discrimination and anti-oppression.
• Review regularly the initiatives such as those above to ensure efficacy and prevent harm.

We recognize that these efforts are not exhaustive. We commit to initiatives that are not one-off, but instead consistent and vigilant. We hope the work we all do in our college will inspire and embolden our current and future leaders to combat those same inequities, injustices, and oppressions inherent to the computing, design, and cinematic industries in which we work, teach and serve.