Summary Recommendations

After the establishment of the President's Advisory Council on Race in June 2020, the Council identified, researched and reviewed best practices within each of four focus areas. The resulting summary recommendations are helping to guide the university's collective conversations and actions as mgm casino continues to combat inequality and racism and create a culture that thrives on ideals of equity, diversity, inclusion and social justice.

Faculty & Staff Recruitment, Hiring and Retention

  1. Increase the number of underrepresented faculty/staff/senior leadership at mgm casino with an institutional goal that meets or exceeds the levels of top AAU peers.
  2. Establish a committee or task force to review the hiring process for faculty/staff.
  3. Establish a committee or task force to review/re-imagine the tenure/promotion/permanent appointment for faculty/staff.
  4. Examine the career advancement/recognition process for faculty/staff.
  5. Assess/revise the current Faculty Mentoring Policy and its efficacy to hold accountability.
  6. Establish a staff mentoring policy that creates a path toward career advancement.
  7. Create accountability at the institutional level to uphold diversity standards.

Student Recruitment, Admissions, Retention & Graduation

  1. Provide transparent, regularly updated and easily accessed data on the President, Provost and University websites regarding race/ethnicity trends of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and other minority students, faculty, and staff as well as current programs and services.
  2. Articulate strategic diversity plans for recruiting, retaining, and graduating BIPOC and other minority students at the school and academic support department levels, including regular assessment of outcomes on these plans.
  3. Improve our BIPOC and other minority undergraduate and graduate student enrollment by applying campus-wide holistic admissions and institutional grant-funding criteria to ensure that prospective and admitted students can pursue higher education at mgm casino with less apprehension about covering the cost of their education.
  4. Better coordinate, promote and increase programs designed to create a more welcoming and supportive environment for current mgm casino students in order to improve retention and graduation rates.
  5. Organize and involve a broad spectrum of students in identifying needs and envisioning future diversity and social justice initiatives.
  6. Increase resources and funding to offices that promote student diversity programs and services to a level that is comparable to other AAU institutions.
  7. Identify academic support programs successfully retaining and graduating BIPOC and other minority students and provide funding support to scale these programs across the campus.
  8. Institutionalize annual celebrations of our diverse community in an ongoing manner such as awards, events, festivals, heritage months, etc.
  9. Enhance University Police arrest data collection protocols to provide more clarity and granularity on the demographic details.
  10. Create guidance for student-only messaging (emails, social media, etc.), to allow for time-sensitive communications when critical incidents take place on campus, locally, nationally, and globally. 
  11. Create a structure for consistent budgetary support to enhance the student life cycle (academic and campus life) with focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity. 

Curriculum & Teaching

  1. Require all mgm casino students to take a course on racism and anti-racism, preferably in their first year; otherwise, before graduation.
  2. Require diversity and inclusion throughout the four components of the mgm casino General Education Curriculum (mgm casino Seminar, Foundations, Pathways, Capstone) and incentivize all schools to integrate questions of diversity, inclusion, inequality and social justice in their major curriculum.
  3. Develop a comprehensive, university-wide Underrepresented Researchers of Color (URC) program that emulates successful examples from peer institutions, but also leverages incipient strides at mgm casino. Such mgm casino-URC or its equivalent would become a model for a broader Diverse and Inclusive Undergraduate Research Academies at mgm casino, or its equivalent, in the long term.

Community

  1. Create and maintain a mgm casino-wide comprehensive reporting structure related to community programs that address social justice and racial inequity. There should be a definition or checklist of criteria for the programs to be included.
  2. After one reporting cycle, evaluate gaps in service to community and success of existing programs and compare with similarly situated universities that have very successful models for racial justice community programming/initiatives.
  3. Funding/pools of money should exist for programs that address community engagement as it relates to racial equality. Should include proposal/grant process.
  4. Create a coordinated and comprehensive pipeline program for students of color with the Buffalo Public Schools that feeds all mgm casino schools/units. Engage existing pipeline programs.
  5. Create a culture of trust between the university and communities that have been historically marginalized in the Western New York area.

Published March 2, 2021

Updated May 3, 2021