As more corporations reap benefits from hiring chief diversity officers, institutions of higher learning have begun to follow their lead. Growing numbers of colleges and universities are using CDOs to help provide a more diverse campus culture for students, faculty, and staff.
For instance, Babson College, a leader in entrepreneurship education, recently appointed its first chief diversity officer, thereby joining the ranks of Harvard, Yale, University of Kentucky, and more than 70 other institutions.
Babson President Brian Barefoot says, “It is essential that as an institution of higher learning we continue to develop a culture of diversity. The students we are charged with educating must learn how to work and live with people who are different from themselves.”
Babson has been
involved in a range of diversity initiatives over the years, including its membership in the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Entrepreneurship Consortium, so hiring a CDO to integrate diversity programs across various departments was a natural next step.“Such a large percentage of our student population is global, so why not take it to the next level?” asks Babson CDO Elizabeth Thornton, citing that minorities represent 23% of the student body. “We saw there was an emerging trend focused on the importance of schools becoming a diverse culture and being able to train future workforces on how to be more inclusive, so that’s what we set out to do.”
To Damon Williams, incoming vice provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it’s
important for schools to focus on the enrollment and retention of a diverse group of students, but what’s more important is the development of academic experiences that prepare students for the real world.A co-author of the study The Chief Diversity Officer: A Primer for College and University Presidents (a book based on the study will be available next year), Williams points out, “The chief diversity officer could play a critical role in helping institutions develop curricula, whether it be in the classroom or outside the classroom, that are going to prepare all students for the world of work.”
Thornton agrees. “Higher education should focus on the business case for diversity,” she s
ays. Her three-pronged plan for Babson stresses attracting, recruiting, and retaining diverse students, faculty, and staff; creating an inclusive environment on campus; and developing minority and global content for the classroom.“We are currently working on building a resource of minority and international content to integrate into the classroom as an integral component of our overall diversity strategy.”
But with minorities still occupying less than 1% of the corner offices of Fortune 500 companies, it remains to be seen how effective CDOs will be in academia. Thornton is optimistic, however: “I believe that CDOs in higher education can help corporations improve these numbers over time. They can partner with corporations to help them achieve their diversity goals by providing them with a pipeline of well-trained graduating students that have been empowered to embrace a diversity mind-set, i.e., the ability to value, interact with, and lead a diverse group of people.”
In addition to having direct access to institutional decision makers — an advantage many corporate CDOs currently do not enjoy — Thornton will work with various organizations and departments to create a more culturally aware campus.
“At Babson, we are compelled to deliberately create an environment that embraces and values differences,” Thornton says. “Being able to effectively engage a global and multicultural society is as much a fundamental requirement for our students’ success as accounting, strategy, and entrepreneurial thinking. Diversity in higher education is no longer just the right thing to do; it is what we must do in order to prepare our future leaders.”