Posted: February 21, 2018
Contact: Doug Anderson, doug.anderson@MinnState.edu, 651-201-1426
February 21, 2018
Dear Minnesota State community,
In recent weeks, I have had conversations with students, faculty, staff, and presidents who expressed their concerns about tensions at our colleges and universities. Everyone I spoke with considers this a critical time, and expresses a need to reaffirm Minnesota State’s commitment to ensuring that our campus learning communities will continue to be deeply enriched by the multiple and often competing perspectives of our learners.
Our campuses will always be places of hope and opportunity where all students – no matter who they are or what community they come from – can feel welcome, feel safe to learn, and feel free to express their hopes, their dreams, and their ideas.
Our diversity and the respect and appreciation for the culture, perspectives, and experiences of others help make our campuses dynamic teaching and learning environments – not just for students, but for all members of the Minnesota State community. Consequently, every one of us must come together and be willing to listen to one another with the full understanding that our viewpoints may be vastly different. We must do this with the goal of learning and growing in our appreciation of each other and the important contribution that each one of us makes to our community.
Our commitment to building, supporting, and sustaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive learning community is still a work in progress, and we all need to be continually focused on its full attainment. It is central to who we are and what we do as a community, and it is something we must all participate in. Under the leadership of Clyde Pickett, we have created a systemwide Equity and Inclusion Council, which will expand and accelerate our efforts around our equity and inclusion goals. This council will also coordinate the efforts of our colleges and universities as they implement their diversity plans. This will be a critical group to provide advice and counsel to diversity officers, to presidents, and to the system office.
The Equity and Inclusion Council will work with the entire community to develop effective strategies that will be felt on campuses across Minnesota. And I am committed to leading our systemwide Leadership Council in developing the needed action steps for this work.
Today, let us as a community recommit and reaffirm that we will not shy away from having bold and courageous conversations, because that is what it will take to create an inclusive learning ethos which will enable each and every one of our students to be integral to the success of the emergent global multicultural world.
Best,
Devinder Malhotra
Interim Chancellor