July Meeting Minutes Summary

• Dr. Christia Brown (in her role as Associate Chair) joined us to discuss Departmental support for the DEI commitee (e.g., a protected meeting time, web edit access, financial support, effort support). She also suggested several ideas to add to our list of potential initatives (support related to immigration status issues amongst our students, affinity groups for students, reading lists/syllabi edits to help faculty decolonize their syllabi, teaching workshops for grad students/faculty, self study [do we have acheviement gaps based on student backgroud - # of students in research labs, placement of our students after graduation rates, retention rates in the major, acceptance rates of grad students.
   
• Adoption of Department-wide Diversity Statement on Sylllubi/Canvas (an update): Dr. Jessica Burris is the point person. We will use/edit Faculty Senate language and also compile a list of student department, campus, and community resources to help students from various backgrounds.
   
• DEI Commitee Meeting Structure for the 2021-2022 Academic Year: We will meet on the first Friday of each month (starting September 3rd). The first meeting is open to all faculty, staff, post-docs, and grad students in our department (we will add undergrad representatives from PsiChi as the semester gets underway); however, we ask that after the first minute, DEI committee members commit to attend at least 75% of our meetings.

• DEI Commitee Leadership Structure: we would like stakeholders at all levels to be represented in leadership. Therefore we will solicit nominations for a leadership sub-committee that will ideally be comprised of at least one faculty member, post-doc, staff member, and graduate student. This sub-committee will meet at least one additional time per month (in addition to the full committee meetings) to set the agenda and discuss strategic plans. There will also be a light adminstrative burden (sending follow-up emails, taking and posting meeting minutes). The leadership subcommittee will rotate each academic year.

Please join us for our first meeting of the academic year on Friday September 3rd at 1pm in Kastle Room 210.