Dear UHP Students,
Over the last few months, UHP administrators and faculty have heard from members of our community expressing lack of support and alienation during their time in the UHP. We are actively listening to students about their experiences and what we hear motivates us to move more quickly to make necessary changes to ensure that each and every student is well supported and able to thrive and succeed in the UHP and at GW more broadly. We sincerely apologize to all of our students who have experienced alienation in our program, and we fully commit ourselves to doing better moving forward. We recognize these issues as urgent matters of justice that call for immediate action, our earnest care, and ongoing commitment. We are thankful to the many students who have shown great leadership in continuing to call for change and we want our UHP community to understand that addressing these issues will be a top priority in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
As we continue to work to create a more diverse and inclusive UHP, we want to inform you of our immediate, short-term, and long-term goals for our program as a whole. Below you will find an initial roadmap for our work, which includes some of the program’s priorities and will be modified and updated as the UHP Diversity & Inclusion Committee develops additional ideas.
Immediate Goals (Summer 2020)
- Implementation of a self-governed Diversity & Inclusion Committee
- Participation in #GWInSolidarity by faculty and staff
- Anti-bias training for peer advisors (followed by continued discussion)
- Ongoing curriculum discussion amongst the core faculty
- Begin to work on improving student awareness of GW’s Bias Incident Response system
Short Term Goals (2020-2021 Academic Year)
- Anti-bias training for faculty, staff and students (followed by continued discussions)
- Improved first-year and general community building
- Working with Admissions to more clearly define our admissions criteria and to improve advertising of the UHP to students applying to GW (including an improved UHP website)
- UHP website page dedicated to reporting on ongoing Diversity and Inclusion initiatives
- Ongoing curriculum updates to first-year courses
- Ongoing discussions between UHP students, administration and faculty to improve diversity, inclusion and belonging with the goal of building trust in our UHP community
Long Term Goals
- Sustaining a welcoming community through programming, yearly anti-bias training, and continued collaborative D&I discussions
- Recruiting and retaining a more diverse student body and faculty
- More variety in UHP upper-level course offerings
We also want to share with you that during the summer, we held our first UHP Diversity & Inclusion Committee meetings. Our conversations were open, honest, and productive. The group is developing a non-hierarchical organization so that students, faculty, and staff have an equal voice in raising concerns, discussing issues, and making recommendations to the program. The faculty and administration who participated in these initial conversations are particularly grateful for the candor of our student participants, and we welcome any additional students who would like to become members of the committee at any time (simply complete this brief form). We will keep the UHP community as a whole updated on the progress of the committee through a minimum of one report per semester (which will be posted on our blog and announced through the weekly Honors NewsFlash).
In solidarity,
The UHP Administration & Faculty
