Complete the work begun by this year's Minority Retention Subcommittee: gather relevant data, hold focus groups, etc., and determine what is being or should be done to strengthen minority detention
Work with the office of the provost and other appropriate offices to monitor University processes documenting recruitment, retention, and graduation of underrepresented minority graduate students.
Encouraging participation by all faculty in small group and online workshops on unconscious bias, covering all types of bias, including racial, class, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion, and making such training mandatory for all search committee members.
Develop a Special Officer for Graduate Student Diversity. With responsibilities to include optimizing the communications between graduate students and affinity groups, forming a working group on diverse student life at Penn, and collaborating in data collection on the experiences of diverse graduate students.
Ongoing faculty training on unconscious bias, microaggressions, and how to teach with diverse students. Added programming during new student orientation that raises awareness to diversity.
To address the concerns of a fragmented and diffused system of resources, the committee recommends that a University-wide office of diversity be established. This office would manage incident reporting, preserve the institutional memory of graduate student organizations, provide robust orientation and training of graduate student group leaders, manage and distribute a fund which supports diverse student groups and other campus-wide diversity initiatives, and provide better coordination of information dissemination and accountability between Penn’s 12 schools.