Discussion of How to Keep up with best practices in DEI (Krystal: 5-10 minutes)

• Continuing Education through the department/larger sphere

  • Accountable for posting/sharing scholarly work?

  • How have DEI Committees been harmful to Black students at other institutions and how can we avoid their mistakes?

    • Krystal shared last summer--DEI members can read this before the next meeting to discuss.

  • What are events that other departmental DEI committees hosting? 

    • We can add this to regularly sent emails by Meagan. This collection of events and communication with Meagan can be a task handled by a subcommittee.

Subcommittee check-in (Baylee: ~40 minutes)

• Formation of Departmental Transparency subcommittee

  • What is involved?

    • Working on transparency within the department so that nothing is hidden. It would be important to have graduate students represented. 

  • General Goals: How are service responsibilities divided up? How are TA assignments made? How are end of semester awards decided? 

  • Members: Shannon, Christal, Julia

• Decolonizing Syllabi Subcommittee

  • Spokesperson: Steven

  • Mission: What needs to be added/removed to departmental syllabi to better foster a diverse environment.

  • Concrete goals for this year: Meeting 10/5 and firm up mission based on assigned reading. Will be delegating future tasks based on past syllabi.

• Increasing Accessibility of Resources (+ web edits)

  • Spokesperson: Jessica

  • Mission: Ways to make resources more accessible via website, social media, and department-wide emails.

  • Concrete goals for this year: 

    • Send a form to department members as to what resources are missing

    • Make the website more streamlined so all important information is in one place.

    • Updating our site with all our new members?

      • Possible PSY399 Internship with DEI to handle social media presence

• Subcommittee on Admissions (near term)

  • Spokesperson: Christal

  • Mission: Increased accessibility

  • Concrete goals for this year: Who is the point person for application questions? How accessible are the fee waivers? Information is duplicated & not properly structured, so how can this be improved? Need to clarify how diverse we currently are. What is the diversity of the current applicant pool, then who makes it to the interview stage. What is the diversity at the undergraduate level- what is the diversity of undergraduate students, classified at the major level and how many students leave the major?

• Subcommittee on Diversifying the Pipeline (long term)

  • Spokesperson: Krystal

  • Mission: Encourage faculty to diversify students at graduate/undergraduate level. 

  • Concrete goals for this year: Review curriculum of psychology classes to see what aspects of diversity are currently being taught. Potential training for faculty and graduate students on how to facilitate diversity conversations. How can faculty be trained in providing quality mentorship towards minority students? How can we better advertise research opportunities to undergraduates? Eventual clarity on GRE requirements for the department, both current and future requirements.

Open Forum: What’s on folks’ minds (Shannon: 5-10 minutes)

• Long-term goals of DEI: Create sustainable structure for the committee. Possibly every subcommittee has 1 goal over the year.

• How are we documenting our change? This is taking what we have learned outside of the DEI committee to the meeting and how we are taking what we are doing broadly into the meeting. This could be an internal document of committee members and what their roles are, which could be a task of the Transparency subcommittee.

• Possible report of what changes have been made and then posting once per semester? 

• Videos for the department website. Steven has updated information after speaking with Jacob at the HIVE. 

  • Who is the audience for the first video? There is potential for many, depending on the audience.

    • Start with recruitment of graduate students & potential faculty. This is formatted to show the conversations that the DEI committee is having.

    • Intended for graduate students understanding the structure of the department.

    • Graduate students and faculty speaking about how holistic mentorship is important. Topics of diversity should be naturally occurring within the conversation, not performative.

  • What should the video look like?

    • Potentially 2 faculty & 2 graduate students discussing how diversity affects their teaching and research. 

    • Possibly another video of graduate students discussing what their sources of support are. 

  • What is the timeline?

    • Some options will take longer than others. Snippets of interviews and B-roll has been done in the past and would not take too long for volunteers. If organic conversations of faculty/graduate students are of interest, this would take a longer time.

    • Steven will make the executive decision based on what the timeline/function of the video will be.