Achieving equity in higher education requires clarity of purpose and sustained, purposeful action. The authors of this important new book are steeped in years of experience in both and provide us with insights, information, tactics, and strategies presented so readers may move at their own pace. And move we must to make colleges and universities learning environments for all our students to thrive.
—Sarita E. Brown, President, Excelencia in Education
No one at any college or university ought to claim a serious commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion without first reading this important book and skillfully implementing its authors’ smart recommendations. It overflows with conceptual brilliance, credible evidence, and practically useful strategies.
—Shaun R. Harper, Provost Professor and Executive Director, University of Southern California Race and Equity Center
From Equity Talk to Equity Walk is a master class on moving from the theory of the case for equity to the expansive action that: facilitates equity-mindedness, creates an equitable perspective of the way forward in higher education, and measures equitable outcomes for students. McNair, Bensimon, and Malcom-Piqueux take the reader through the academic scholarship on equity, to the practical application of the same, through their direct, unapologetic approach on the matter, to their first-hand recounting of case studies of their direct work with hundreds of institutions, all in an effort to meet the readers where they are on their equity journey.
From Equity Talk to Equity Walk serves as a confirming love letter for the duly-initiated equity walkers as well as a guide and a handbook for the newly initiated equity talkers! This book is required reading for every institutional or policy practitioner whose goal is to facilitate and realize institutional transformation at their college or university, and to achieve equitable outcomes for historically underrepresented, minoritized, and marginalized students seeking to complete a college education within structures and systems that were not created or designed for their success. For all of us seeking to upend those systems and structures, and build a new model for current and future collegians – focused on student success for all students, not the few – this book is for you!
—Yolanda Watson Spiva, PhD, President, Complete College America
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FIRST EDITION
Completing this book would not have been possible without the dedication and commitment of many people throughout this journey. A special thank you to Ben Dedman, associate editor and staff writer, print and digital content, at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), who read drafts of the chapters and provided feedback and editing guidance. Also, thank you to JoEllen Alberts, program coordinator in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success, who did reference checks and file organization for submission deadlines.
We are additionally grateful to Debbie Hanson, senior project specialist, at the USC Center for Urban Education, for the development and facilitation of data-based activities to assist our campus partners in learning how to make sense of data, and to Deanna Cherry, senior facilitator, for leading the facilitation of activities and dialogue at the Equity Academy held in 2015 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
The work highlighted in this book represents the devotion of countless educators seeking to improve the experiences of students who have been traditionally marginalized in higher education. Thank you for all you have done and continue to do; We want to specifically thank the institutions that participated in AAC&U's Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus-Based Strategies for Student Success funded by USA Funds (now Strada Education Network) and Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation (now Ascendium Education Group). To Dr. Lorenzo Esters, who served as our program officer and who initially funded this project, thank you for your vision, your confidence, and your willingness to partner with us. The power of our collective action will prevail.
A special thank you to the people in our lives who support us unconditionally. We couldn't do what we do without you.
Tia Brown McNair currently is the vice president of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and Executive Director for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), where she leads national efforts to improve quality in undergraduate education for underserved students. McNair also directs AAC&U's Summer Institutes on High-Impact Educational Practices and Student Success and TRHT Campus Centers.
Dr. McNair serves as the project director for several AAC&U initiatives: Strengthening Guided Pathways and Career Success by Ensuring Students Are Learning; Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Campus Centers; and Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence. She also directed AAC&U's national projects on Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus-Based Strategies for Student Success, Advancing Underserved Student Success through Faculty Intentionality in Problem-Centered Learning, Advancing Roadmaps for Community College Leadership to Improve Student Learning and Success, and Developing a Community College Roadmap. She is the lead author of the book Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success (with Susan Albertine, Michelle Asha Cooper, Nicole McDonald, and Thomas Major Jr.). McNair is a co-author on the publication Assessing Underserved Students' Engagement in High-Impact Practices (with Ashley Finley).
Estela Mara Bensimon is Dean's Professor in Educational Equity at the USC Rossier School of Education and Director of the Center for Urban Education, which she founded in 1999. In 2017, she was elected to the National Academy of Education and she was presented with the 2017 Social Justice in Education Award by the American Educational Research Association. She is also a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. In January 2018, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Dr. Bensimon to the Education Commission of the States. She also serves on the Campaign for College Opportunity board of directors and is a Distinguished Fellow in the Association for American Colleges and Universities. She earned her doctorate in higher education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Dr. Bensimon has published extensively about equity, organizational learning, practitioner inquiry, and change. Her most recent books include Critical Approaches to the Study of Higher Education (co-edited with Ana Martinez-Aleman and Brian Pusser), which was selected as the 2016 Outstanding Publication by the American Educational Research Association, Division of Postsecondary Education; Engaging the Race Question: Accountability and Equity in US Higher Education (with Alicia C. Dowd), Confronting Equity Issues on Campus: Implementing the Equity Scorecard in Theory and Practice (co-edited with Lindsey Malcom).
Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux leads the Office of Institutional Research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Her scholarly research focuses on understanding the institutional conditions that advance racial and gender equity in STEM fields. Prior to joining Caltech, she served as the associate director of Research and Policy at the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California. She has also held faculty positions at the George Washington University and the University of California, Riverside.
Dr. Malcom-Piqueux's work has appeared in Educational Researcher, the Review of Higher Education, Harvard Educational Review, among other journals, and in volumes edited by Routledge, SUNY Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Stylus Publishing. She earned her PhD in Urban Education with an emphasis in higher education from the University of Southern California, her MS in Planetary Science from Caltech, and her BS in Planetary Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Center for Urban Education (CUE) leads socially conscious research and develops tools for higher education institutions to produce racial/ethnic equity in student outcomes. Racial and ethnic equity in outcomes remains a problem in higher education despite decades of policies and reforms that seek access, opportunity, and success for African American, Latinx, Native American, and other racially minoritized students. Housed at the USC's Rossier School of Education, CUE works with practitioners and policy makers across the country to devise and implement race-conscious, equity-minded, and context-specific solutions that fundamentally reimagine the kind of change that is needed to achieve equity for racially minoritized students.
Since CUE's founding in 1999, more than a hundred two-year and four-year colleges and universities in 14 states have partnered with CUE to use the Equity Scorecard™ and learn about the concept of “equity-mindedness” that is the foundation for institutional responsibility. More information can be found at https://cue.usc.edu.
AAC&U is the leading national association dedicated to advancing the vitality and public standing of liberal education by making quality and equity the foundations for excellence in undergraduate education in service to democracy. Its members are committed to extending the advantages of a liberal education to all students, regardless of academic specialization or intended career. Founded in 1915, AAC&U now comprises 1400 member institutions – including accredited public and private colleges, community colleges, research universities, and comprehensive universities of every type and size.
AAC&U functions as a catalyst and facilitator, forging links among presidents, administrators, faculty, and staff engaged in institutional and curricular planning. Through a broad range of activities, AAC&U reinforces the collective commitment to liberal education at the national, local, and global levels. Its high-quality programs, publications, research, meetings, institutes, public outreach efforts, and campus-based projects help individual institutions ensure that the quality of student learning is central to their work as they evolve to meet new economic and social challenges. Information about AAC&U can be found at www.aacu.org.
Throughout the course of their innovative book, Tia Brown McNair, Estela Mara Bensimon, and Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux illustrate how white privilege functions at multiple levels in the academy, from high-profile admission scandals such as the Varsity Blues and the proliferation of white supremacist activity on college campuses to dominant norms in constructing class assignments and syllabi that erase the contributions of minoritized groups. Their pivotal scholarship draws urgent attention to the ways in which the prevailing national rhetoric has fostered a new permission structure, encouraging speech and actions that previously would have been condemned as racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, ableist or otherwise discriminatory, while simultaneously unveiling underlying practices that contribute to the persistence of racial inequality in the classroom and beyond. In response to these challenges, the authors call for a paradigm shift in language and behavior that places “equity-mindedness” at the center of institutional missions, providing a framework for the development of a comprehensive set of beliefs, values and actions. It is an approach that necessitates both an honest assessment of, and genuine reckoning with, the structural barriers and hidden biases that pervade our own colleges, universities, organizations and associations, mitigating against articulated equity goals as the foundation for student success.
One of the most compelling features of From Equity Talk to Equity Walk is that the authors begin by considering the implications of their own language use, participating in the very exercise they are enjoining others to undertake as a means of advancing “engaged inclusivity.” Utilizing case studies, examples, and powerful narrative, these researchers remind us that preserving our nation's historic mission of educating for democracy mandates all institutions of higher education to play a leadership role in advancing racial and social justice.
In the process of providing a roadmap for campuses that have the courage to interrogate the reasons why racial inequities remain, McNair, Bensimon, and Malcom-Piqueux highlight the primary importance of arriving at a shared definition of equity. The practical suggestions they pose for how various approaches might be integrated to address complex issues of campus culture and inclusive excellence offer promise for lasting institutional transformation. At the same time, their examination of the political, social and cultural forces that influence higher education practice and pedagogy signals the demonstrated need for colleges and universities to act as anchor institutions, whose success is inextricably linked to the economic, educational, physical and psycho-social well-being of the communities in which they are located and the individuals they seek to serve.
—Lynn Pasquerella
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
– Nelson Mandela
We finished writing this book in the same week that men and women in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio were murdered by two white supremacists fueled by xenophobic hate and bigotry. Much to our dismay these horrific crimes came on the heels of the very public taunting of four congresswomen of color with the epithet of “go back to your countries” and the dehumanization of Baltimore's Black citizens by portraying them and their neighborhoods as infested by vermin. The growing racial tensions in our society and the impact it has had, and will have, on our individual psyche and who we are as a nation, cannot be ignored and dismissed as isolated incidents because they keep adding up. Racism permeates every aspect of our country and the time to address the pervasive impact of ideologies fueled by hate is now. In 1964, our country came the closest it ever has to legislate on behalf of racial justice. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was heralded as a moment in which we confronted in thought and action the wrongs committed in the name of whiteness. We must be willing to advocate for racial justice in all aspects of our society by expanding our knowledge on why and how we keep returning to the place where people are taught to hate instead of love, and where our differences are seen as what divides us, and not what makes us stronger and more knowledgeable.
In this time of public and overt hatred and bigotry it is more important than ever that higher education leaders, faculty, staff, and trustees resolve to speak back and exercise racial equity with vigor and conviction. It is incumbent on higher education to mobilize the power of knowledge and moral leadership to combat the malaise of white supremacy to prepare the next generation of leaders to not repeat the cycle of perpetual harm and trauma we are seeing today.