Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Action

Planning, Leadership, and Programming

Christine Bombaro

• Publisher: ALA Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780838947593
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838948378
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

All too often, in a hurried attempt to "catch up," diversity training can create division among staff or place undue burdens on a handful of employees. Instead, academic libraries need approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that position these priorities as ongoing institutional and professional goals. This book's model programs will help academic libraries do exactly that, sharing a variety of initiatives that possess clear goals, demonstrable outcomes, and reproducible strategies. Librarians, administrators, and directors will all benefit from the programs detailed inside, which include such topics as

• a university library's community of practice for interactions and learning around DEI;
• cultural competency training to create more welcoming instruction spaces;
• student workshops on literature searches that mitigate bias;
• overcoming the historic tendency to marginalize LGBTQ+ representation in archives;
• a curriculum and design workshop that moved from discussing social values to embedding them in actions;
• the founding of a library-led LGBT club for students at a rural community college;
• a liberal arts college's retention-boosting program for first-generation students;
• tailoring a collection and library services to the unique needs of student veterans; and
• a framework for moving from diversity to equity and inclusion, toward a goal of social justice.

MATTHEW P. CISZEK

1

Moving from Diversity to Equity and Inclusion with Social Justice as the Goal

A New Framework for an Expansive Definition of Diversity

BACKGROUND

The focus on diversity in higher education in the United States and in American academic libraries is rooted in the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s. Landmark rulings by the United States Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), paved the way for equal rights for all Americans by ending Jim Crow–era laws of racial segregation and “separate but equal” accommodations based on race. Case law led to further federal legislation, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Education Amendments Act of 1972 (Title IX), which codified equal representation under the law for several marginalized and underrepresented groups. Subsequently, colleges and universities created programs to ensure equitable access to higher education and to diversify its workforce, including affirmative action in admissions and hiring, the expansion of women’s intercollegiate athletics, and nondiscrimination policies that became increasingly expansive over the next three decades as veterans, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ persons, and others were added as protected groups.

Diversity, and the closely related concept of multiculturalism, became defined by this growing list of protected groups. Academic libraries sought to create multicultural collections, programs, and services as a means of increasing awareness of a diversifying society, and colleges and universities created offices and programs centered on diversity, educational equity, and affirmative action and hired staff to manage and oversee these offices and programs. Unfortunately, many of these showed only modest gains at best in diversifying higher education. Colleges and universities needed to do more than just build awareness of diversity and treat educational equity as something separate from the central mission of the institution. Higher education institutions and academic libraries needed to more explicitly make diversity and multiculturalism part of their core values and strategic goals.

By the mid-1990s both higher education and academic librarianship began to respond to new challenges in the academic landscape, including the changing demographics of college and university students; solid research that a diverse faculty and student body and programs highlighting multiculturalism in coursework, library collections, and programming can enrich the educational experience of students; and the belief that higher education is one of the best means of increasing social mobility and socioeconomic equality. There was a strong push to add diversity to the mission and value statements of institutions of higher education and academic libraries. Diversity was included in college and university strategic plans for the first time, with the goal of making students culturally competent and aware of the diverse world in which they live.

During the same period, librarianship as a profession began to embrace diversity and multiculturalism as part of its core values and strategic goals. In the 1990s, the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the Association for Research Libraries (ARL) created offices and programs focusing on diversity. ALA created the Spectrum Scholarship in 1997 to diversify librarianship by attracting students from underrepresented groups to the profession and added diversity as a core value of librarianship. This push to make diversity central to librarianship culminated for academic librarians in ACRL’s Diversity Standards: Cultural Competency for Academic Libraries (2012), which states, “Diversity is an essential component of any civil society. It is more than a moral imperative; it is a global necessity. Everyone can benefit from diversity, and diverse populations need to be supported so they can reach their full potential for themselves and their communities.”1

As the concepts of diversity and multiculturalism were incorporated into the core values and strategic directions of institutions of both higher education and librarianship, the focus shifted from celebrating diversity and raising awareness of diverse voices in our communities to actively promoting equity and inclusion of these diverse voices in academia and the profession. The term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and similar terms began to replace “diversity” as academic libraries grappled with how to highlight diversity in our collections and services while also providing professional opportunities to those from diverse backgrounds. Social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, exposed systemic societal inequities and spurred higher education, somewhat reluctantly, to confront the fact that most of the programs, offices, and systems created to further diversity over the last forty years had failed to provide any real gains in equity and inclusion, especially among racial and ethnic minorities. By the mid-2000s, ALA finally incorporated diversity into its strategic directions and expanded the definitions of diversity to include equity and inclusion. All of these caused many in the profession to ask if our existing DEI initiatives were truly enough, or if more radical measures were necessary to further these goals.

Over the last half century, academic librarianship has grappled with responsibilities such as highlighting diverse voices; creating collections, programs, and services for underrepresented groups; and remaining equitable and inclusive in our day-to-day work. As comprehensive as these efforts may appear, they are simply not enough to affect the societal change necessary to ensure that we live in a just and equitable society. In addition, Cruz asserts that “today’s politically charged society in which instances of racially motivated or other kinds of bias are recorded on mobile phones and uploaded to the Internet almost daily” has made “awareness and sensitivity to diversity” more important than ever.2 The profession has become acutely aware of this need after the 2016 presidential election in the United States, along with the rise of authoritarianism, hate groups, and “fake news,” which seeks to negate even the small gains librarianship has made in DEI over the years.

A subtle shift from traditional DEI initiatives and programs to an emphasis on social justice is starting to occur throughout librarianship and higher education institutions. The rise of critical librarianship and critical pedagogy, a renewed attention to examining power structures and privilege in higher education, and concentrated efforts to dismantle these power structures and replace them with those that privilege all equitably brought social justice to the foreground. Making social justice a key component of curriculum and our work as librarians has the effect of shifting “existing paradigms as [students] are challenged to learn about themselves and others and to take action to change the status quo. [S]ocial justice is about eradicating systematic marginalization and privilege.”3 It has become evident to many academic librarians that if we truly seek a just and equitable society, doing the difficult work of social justice is the only means to accomplish these goals.

DEFINITIONS

As the brief historical sketch above illustrates, the definition of diversity in academic libraries and in librarianship has changed over the years. A focus on diversity originated as a response to an increasingly diverse population and as a means of highlighting minority and underrepresented communities. Diversity became defined as “groups marginalized by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and/or other cultural characteristics.”4 Most institutions of higher education and academic libraries have created an expansive definition of diversity along these lines, and have built services, programs, and offices around this definition. Embracing, welcoming, and supporting students, faculty, and staff from “diverse backgrounds” including a “broad range of possible group differences that includes race, culture, ethnicity, disability, lifestyle choice, creed, and socioeconomic factors” has become central to the mission of academic libraries and institutions of higher education.5

Librarianship has also developed similar definitions. ALA has long recognized that “diversity is an essential component of any civil society” and adopted policy statements and built services and programming accordingly.6 One of ALA’s goals for libraries of all types has been to “achieve diversity in substance as well as in form” and to “open their arms to all perspectives and experiences.”7 These policy statements pursued the goal of “equal access to information for all persons” by formally recognizing the “ongoing need to increase awareness of and responsiveness to the diversity of the communities” that libraries serve.8 These definitions of diversity served both academia and librarianship well for a time, but it became clear that awareness of a diverse society and tacit programs and services supporting diversity were not enough to guarantee equity and inclusion for all. A concerted effort to include the concepts of equity and inclusion, along with diversity, as a central priority of higher education, academic libraries, and the profession was needed, and our definitions and conceptualizations of diversity have changed to meet this need.

We made DEI a central component of our work with the goal of creating “a world where information spaces reflect the global community and a level playing field; information is equitably and inclusively accessible; research contributes new modes of access and representation for underserved populations; and diversity becomes an integrated part of our consciousness” as academic librarians.9 Semenza, Koury, and Shropshire observed that there is a “clear sense of responsibility among libraries to bring awareness to cultural competencies to advance equality and create opportunities for libraries to serve as examples of best practices in the changing society.”10 Additionally, this work has taken a central role in the mission of institutions of higher education as a whole. The entire academic community, from administrators to faculty to students, is now expected to share responsibility for creating a “culturally inclusive environment” with DEI initiatives as its central mission.11

Likewise, ALA has developed similar definitions that capture the shift from diversity to DEI. The “ALA Policy Manual” states that in order to “be inclusive, our association, profession, and society must recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every member of the community; involve and empower all members to participate and contribute; promote and sustain a sense of belonging; and value and practice respect for the talents, beliefs, backgrounds, and ways of living of all members.”12 This is further explicated in the ALA Strategic Directions, which states that ALA “recognizes that equity, diversity, and inclusion . . . impacts all aspects of work among members of the Association, within the field of librarianship, and within the communities served by libraries. This work includes addressing, dismantling, and transforming policies, structures, and biases throughout the organization and the field of librarianship.”13

The work of addressing, dismantling, and transforming the policies, structures, and biases of higher education institutions and academic libraries often takes the form of social justice. One goal ALA has strived to achieve over the past fifty years has been the creation of a “just and equitable profession and society where everyone has access to social power, resources, and physical and psychological safety.”14 Only through the work of social justice can this goal truly be realized, and both academic librarians and higher education institutions as a whole have shifted to a focus on social justice as the means of accomplishing our shared equity, diversity, and inclusion priorities.

Morales, Knowles, and Bourg assert that social justice is a “concept that encompasses more than representation and diversity and is generally understood to refer to the ability of all people to fully benefit from social and economic progress and to participate equally in democratic societies. In other words, social justice addresses power and privilege on a structural level, as well as at the level of mere representation.”15 Saunders adds that since “information is created within existing power structures, and those power structures can impact the production and dissemination of information, as well as distort, suppress, or misrepresent information,” academic libraries must “understand and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction, by Christine Bombaro
• 1 | Moving from Diversity to Equity and Inclusion with Social Justice as the Goal
• 2 | Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as Action
• 3 | Diversity from the Inside Out
• 4 | That’s Just the Way It Is
• 5 | Mitigating Implicit Bias in Reference Service and Literature Searching
• 6 | Creating an Inclusive Teaching and Learning Program for Academic Libraries
• 7 | Reconstructing History
• 8 | Student Veterans on Campus
• 9 | How Librarians Can Improve First-Generation Student Retention through Outreach, Immersion, and Partnerships
• 10 | Interns, Inclusion, and Iteration
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index