Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives: Theoretical Foundations, Practical Applications, and Facilitator Considerations

Higher education is facing a perfect storm as it contends with changing demographics, shrinking budgets and concerns about access and cost, while underrepresented groups – both in faculty ranks and students – are voicing dissatisfaction with campus climate and demanding changes to structural inequities.

This book argues that, to address the inexorable changes ahead, colleges and universities need both to centralize the value of diversity and inclusion and employ a set of strategies that are enacted at all levels of their institutions. It argues that individual and institutional change efforts can only be achieved by implementing “diversity as a value” – that is embracing social change efforts as central and additive rather than episodic and required – and provides the research and theoretical frameworks to support this approach, as well as tools and examples of practice that accomplish change.

The contributors to this book identify the elements that drive successful multicultural initiatives and that strengthen the effectiveness of campus efforts to dismantle systemic oppression, as well as the individual and organization skills needed to manage difference effectively. Among these is developing the capacity of administrators, faculty and student affairs professionals as conscious scholar practitioners to sensitively manage conflicts on campus, deconstruct challenging structures and reconstruct the environment intentionally to include in respectful ways experiences of historically marginalized groups and non-dominant ways of being in the world.

The books’ focus on developing capacities for multicultural competence aligns with higher education’s increasing emphasis on civic engagement and institutional goals promote skills to interact in meaningful and responsible ways around difference, whether of people, ideas or identities.

Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives provides guiding principles and practical strategies to successfully transform higher education to become fully inclusive and advance the success of all constituents and stakeholders.

Sherry K. Watt, Ph.D., NCC, LPC is a professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program the University of Iowa. She is also the co-creator of the Multicultural Initiatives (MCI) Research Team. Prior to becoming a faculty member, she worked as a residence life director and a career counselor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, North Carolina State University, and Shaw University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies from University of North Carolina at Greensboro and masters and doctoral degrees in Counselor Education, with an emphasis in student affairs, from North Carolina State University. She is also founder of The Being Institute (thebeinginstitute.org). Sherry is a facilitator prepared by the Center for Courage and Renewal. She is the editor of Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives: Theoretical Foundations, Practical Applications, and Facilitator Considerations (Stylus, 2015). She has over 25 years of experience in designing and leading educational experiences that involve strategies to engage participants in dialogue that is meaningful, passionate, and self-awakening.

Marybeth Gasman is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education and a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University. She serves as the Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice and the Executive Director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, Marybeth was the Judy & Howard Berkowitz Endowed Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, Marybeth also served as the founding director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). Her areas of expertise include the history of American higher education, Minority Serving Institutions (with an emphasis on Historically Black Colleges and Universities), racism and diversity, fundraising and philanthropy, and higher education leadership. She is the author or editor of 25 books, including Educating a Diverse Nation (Harvard University Press, 2015 with Clif Conrad), Envisioning Black Colleges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and her newest book Making Black Scientists (Harvard University Press, 2019 with Thai-Huy Nguyen). Marybeth has written over 250 peer-reviewed articles, scholarly essays, and book chapters. She has penned over 450 opinion articles for the nation’s newspapers and magazines and is ranked by Education Week as one of the 10 most influential education scholars in the nation. Marybeth has raised over $23 million in grant funding to support her research and that of her students, mentees, and MSI partners. Marybeth has served on the board of trustees of The College Board as well as Paul Quinn College, a small, urban, historically Black College in Dallas, Texas. She considers her proudest accomplishment to be receiving the University of Pennsylvania’s Provost Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring, serving as the dissertation chair for over 80 doctoral students since 2000.