|
Our panel was there to discuss these issues, as well as the hidebound nature of some of our core, scholarly questions, which still tended to privilege the white, male, American perspective. Presenting with me on this panel was a senior scholar and longtime chair of our diversity committee, who would soon go on to become a dean and college president. These were issues that had been important to him for years, and he told me that one lesson you learn is that there is no “endpoint” for your diversity efforts, no magic goalpost you reach when you can say “Guess what, we solved it!” As successful as you might be in one area, new issues and challenges are always going to emerge, and the old ways of addressing one problem might suddenly feel insufficient.
This piece of advice stays with me as we work toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in our research practices, policies, and outputs at UC. It’s challenging. Hopefully, many of us take seriously the goal of having real racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in our laboratories and among our research teams, and making sure these are open and welcoming spaces. But have we really considered what it would mean to make our research practice accessible to folks with various disabilities? And are their underlying racist, classist, sexist, or ableist assumptions in our core questions?
Some of us might be overwhelmed by this prospect, and constantly have to evaluate and re-evaluate core aspects of our work. But it’s important to remember that this is not a “DEI contest,” where we award a winner, and there is also so much any one of us can do at any time. We need to work to address immediate concerns, but also truly commit to best practices in all of our processes. For example, when recruiting, hiring, and mentoring graduate students, research staff, and faculty members, we should not just follow the bare minimum of standards laid out by our colleagues in human resources. With every search, we should be aggressively looking for a wide, deep, and diverse pool of applicants, with interview practices in place that ensure equity in the decision-making process.
Committing to well-documented best practices in one area gives us space to consider thornier challenges specific to our disciplines, fields, or own research projects. It also puts us on a path of continual improvement whereby we can have open and honest discussions as a university community, working to constantly make small adjustments, but also consider more significant shifts in our policies.
These are significant challenges, that will take time and resources to address. But the work of making a truly equitable and just society never really ends, and we need to make this same commitment to the University of Cincinnati as a research institution.
| 
