Instilling Inclusivity in Higher Education Practice

If there’s one thing I consider problematic when it comes to NASPA/ACPA’s professional competencies, it’s that social justice and inclusion is considered distinct from other competencies like advising and supporting students or leadership.

To me, social justice and inclusion is integral to all student affairs work, and so to treat it as a separate entity and to never mention that socially just, inclusive practices are an intrinsic part of supporting students or effective leadership is indicative of what I consider to be one of higher education’s foremost challenges: espousing social justice and inclusion as values without actually recognizing that it must be recognized and instilled in every part of higher education.

Fortunately, I have seen some efforts made to normalize the notion of social justice and inclusion throughout higher education. Just last month, for example, I attended a professional development seminar on inclusive advising practices, during which I was prompted reflected on how those who advise and mentor students (myself included) must be ever-mindful of the backgrounds, experiences, and identities students possess in order to adequately support them. Residential programming, too, in the living learning village I help manage as part of my graduate assistantship at North Carolina State University likewise centers topics of diversity of inclusion as a core feature of the village.

The professional development plan I created at the start of my higher education master's program.

All of this is to say, therefore, that I do not consider socially just, inclusive practices as necessarily separate from the other NASPA/ACPA competencies, particularly advising and supporting students. Indeed, this was certainly how I conceived of the competency when I identified advising and supporting students in the professional development plan I completed at the start of my higher education master’s program. To me, you cannot successfully advise and support students without also being inclusive and socially just, and so I view them both as mutually reinforcing.

Unfortunately, however, WPU has been a bit behind the times compared to NCSU in terms of inclusive practices. It was not until the fall of 2017, for instance, that WPU hired a full-time staff member whose express purpose was to address issues of diversity and inclusion, the impetus for which was a campus climate survey conducted by NCSU higher education administration alumnus John Robinson-Miller IV. The survey indicated that students of color felt neglected by the WPU community, particularly when incidents of racial bias and/or discrimination occurred, and that there were perceived racial tensions between these students and their White peers. Only after presenting this survey to WPU’s board of trustees was the position for a full-time staff member approved, as anecdotal accounts of these students’ feelings had fallen on deaf ears.

At the time when all of this initially unfolded, I was just about to enter NCSU’s higher education administration master’s program, and while I’d always had a passion for social justice, my awareness of inclusive practices and how to actually effect social justice was marginal at best. During my time in the program these past two and a half years, I’d like to think that I’ve made some strides in that area, however. For example, I’ve learned that intergroup dialogue, in which individuals with varying social identities convene to discuss societal issues such as inequity and racism, can be an especially effective tool for fostering allyship among those with privileged identities (Dessel, Rogg, & Garlington, 2016; Frantell, Miles, & Ruwe, 2019). For those with oppressed identities, on the other hand, I’ve learned that their development, such as their ability to self-author who they are and what they believe, often necessitates that they resist systemic barriers that undermine their own experiences (Abes & Hernandez, 2016). As a result, higher education practitioners would do well to validate these students’ identities and experiences, as well as recognize and attempt to mitigate the risks that sometimes follow attempts to self-author (Abes & Hernandez, 2016).

For my part, this is precisely what I’ve tried to do in my role as an intern at the CSS. And while I haven’t had much opportunity to do so in my interactions with students (because I simply haven’t had that much direct contact working advising and supporting them), there have been a handful of opportunities where I’ve been able to practice and instruct WPU’s peer mentors about these strategies for inclusion. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the peer mentor manual I created for the 2019-2020 academic year. I poured over page upon page of what effectively amounted to a hodgepodge of topics the entirety of WPU staff and faculty thought might be applicable to the peer mentor position, all of which had been loosely compiled into peer mentor manuals of years past. Two of the principal issues with these previous manuals, however, were that they framed gender as a he/she binary, and there was no mention of how socioeconomic and/or ability status may influence first year students’ participation in events and activities that peer mentors were tasked with developing to aid in their transition.

One of the first things I did when creating this year’s manual, therefore, was to change all of the gender pronouns to the gender neutral “they, them, theirs” as a way to subtly challenge the gender binary and bring visibility (and therefore validation) to those who identify as transgender or genderqueer. Additionally, I compiled an extensive list of inclusive practices for peer mentors to reference and make use of themselves in a section of the manual I titled “Principles for Building an Inclusive Classroom as a Peer Mentor.” Much of the recommendations included correspond with my own experiences and learning in NCSU’s higher education master’s program: start with yourself in recognizing your identities, self-educate yourself on other identities, acknowledge and affirm students’ experiences, etc. Finally, when compiling a list of community-building activities and teambuilders, I also made sure to affirm that students’ ability status should be taken into account, and I likewise provided recommendations for how individual activities might be altered in order to accomplish this.

For the students’ sake, I sincerely hope that such changes make a difference, and that this year’s cohort of peer mentors understand that in order to successfully advise and support the first year students they are charged with helping, they must also practice socially just, inclusive practices. And while WPU still has a ways to go in terms of infusing such strategies into all aspects of its operations, perhaps the university’s greatest assets in doing so are the students themselves. If the approval of WPU’s first full-time diversity and inclusion specialist is any indication, student voices are indispensable.