Diversity & Inclusion Committee

Committee Charge

The Diversity and Inclusion Committee began in 2018. In alignment with the department’s diversity statement and the College of Arts and Sciences’ core values, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee will oversee and examine the current as well as future climate of our department to ensure that we are committed to:

Ensuring equity and access across the board range of our research, teaching, and co-curricular activities.
Maintaining a culture in which all students, faculty, staff, and clients feel welcome, regardless of race, ethnicity, language or dialect, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ability status, educational credentials, socioeconomic status, immigration status, and other forms of difference

The committee will identify ways to improve the overall student, faculty, and staff experience in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences with a focus on departmental climate. We believe that tangible, educational, organizational, and personal benefits result from applying a critical lens to ourselves and our environment, individually and collectively examining our biases, assumptions, and worldviews, and challenging and mitigating structural inequities. The committee will work toward ensuring that we are continuously evaluating the climate of both departmental and co-curricular activities ensuring that our Department is fostering a culture in which all in which all students, faculty, staff, and clients feel welcome. We recognize that our department is not representative of the demographics of the populations we serve and recognize our position to fix this.

We, the community of faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences are committed to anti-racism and social justice work. We are committed to no longer pretending that we can excel in the practice of speech-language therapy, audiology, or research in the speech, language, and hearing science fields while ignoring the racism that permeates the system in which we practice. We intend to enhance our curriculum, transform our practice, and broaden our research agenda in order to be a positive force for change.