Strategic Diversity Leadership: Activating Change and Transformation in Higher Education

In today's world - whether viewed through a lens of educational attainment, economic development, global competitiveness, leadership capacity, or social justice and equity  diversity is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing to do!

Following the era of civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1990s and early twenty-first century have seen both retrenchment and backlash years, but also a growing recognition, particularly in business and the military, that we have to educate and develop the capacities of our citizens from all levels of society and all demographic and social groups to live fulfilling lives in an inter-connected globe.

For higher education that means not only increasing the numbers of diverse students, faculty, and staff, but simultaneously pursuing excellence in student learning and development, as well as through research and scholarship - in other words pursuing what this book defines as strategic diversity leadership. The aim is to create systems that enable every student, faculty, and staff member to thrive and achieve maximum potential within a diversity framework.

This book is written from the perspective that diversity work is best approached as an intellectual endeavor with a pragmatic focus on achieving results that takes an evidence-based approach to operationalizing diversity. It offers an overarching conceptual framework for pursuing diversity in a national and international context; delineates and describes the competencies, knowledge, and skills needed to take effective leadership in matters of diversity; offers new data about related practices in higher education; and presents and evaluates a range of strategies, organizational structures, and models drawn from institutions of all types and sizes. It covers such issues as the reorganization of the existing diversity infrastructure, building accountability systems, assessing the diversity process, and addressing legal threats to implementation.

Its purpose is to help strategic diversity leaders combine big-picture thinking with an on-the-ground understanding of organizational reality, and work strategically with key stakeholders and allies.

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