Held on July 28 at the School of Nursing, this session was a follow-up to the May 6 forum “A Discussion About Race in Baltimore.” 

Dr. Perman: The conversation we’re having today is a continuation of the one we started on May 6. That was the day we got together to talk about race in Baltimore. It was less than three weeks after the death of Freddie Gray, two weeks after his funeral.

And you’ll recall the funeral coincided with widespread rioting that broke out in our city, and we saw clearly, in stark relief, the decaying of our community. So we agreed that we would have a venue to ask challenging questions, a safe space for open dialogue, and we wanted and you wanted to set some momentum to map a path forward.‌

So that’s what we did that day, and I sat right here and listened for an hour and a half as our panelists, and then some of you, talked about racism, poverty, and disinvestment as it relates to the community in which we’re a part of, West Baltimore. We talked about what we are doing and what we can do to help restore equity, opportunity, and justice for those who have been denied a fair chance.

But as students, faculty, and staff took the microphone for comments, another piece of the conversation started to emerge, and that had to do with our own institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, our institutional commitment to meaningful community engagement and how to operationalize these principles in a way that brings healing to communities both inside and outside the University.

It was a candid conversation. It was emotional at times. There are some that talked about their own personal story within the University and the community, many of whom focused on the family as a whole, and it took a great deal of courage I know for people to speak freely about difficult and sometimes deeply personal issues. So I’m most appreciative on behalf of the leadership of the University to everyone who took part in that exchange.

That day I promised that we’d keep the conversation going. So I asked our Diversity Advisory Council to review the full transcript of the 90-minute conversation, which we videotaped, as is today’s, and to identify the issues that rose to the surface in that conversation and to provide me a set of recommendations on how to address those issues. Let me also add here that there’s a difference between listening and in some circumstances always agreeing with what is being said, and that’s where I as a leader have to take the final responsibility.

One of the first things the conversation revealed is that there are a lot of people on campus who don’t even know we have a Diversity Advisory Council (DAC). This is something that I organized shortly after I came back here, and I’m delighted to shine a spotlight on that group today. In a few minutes, I’ll be joined by the council’s chair, Dr. Elsie Stines, and vice chair, Dr. Vanessa Fahie, as they go through the group’s recommendations.

When I first returned to our campus, I had to decide whether I should have a chief diversity officer. I decided against it because I deeply believe that cultivating diversity can’t be the job of one person. It has to be suffused throughout the University.

We needed a bigger group of individuals with representation from across the University to advise me and the leadership on matters of diversity and to hold us accountable for institutionalizing it. In fact, that’s what’s in the strategic plan. Very recently, the diversity council expanded its membership to include more faculty and staff from each of the seven schools and to include representatives from the faculty, staff, and student senates. 

Today we’re also joined by my leadership colleague Dr. Roger Ward, who’s the University’s chief accountability officer and vice president. He’s taken on a number of roles recently, including that of interim chief human resources officer, which is obviously very important to some of this conversation.

The conversation is still in its early stages, and what we discuss this morning doesn’t necessarily represent a finality or totality of what we’ll undertake. As we listen to these recommendations, some of these need to be brought back to the senior leadership teams and to the shared governance mechanisms of this University. 

So let me get back to what the DAC found when members reviewed the May 6 transcript. The comments from students, faculty, and staff largely fell into three broad categories. Career and professional advancement, cultural competency, and community service and engagement. 

On the first theme, career and professional advancement, we heard frustration from some employees who believe that UMB is diverse but questioned how equitable and how inclusive we really are. So, our first question, are under-represented minorities, in particular African-Americans, routinely passed over for promotions and other advancement opportunities? No. 2, does the University lack clear career pathways, particularly in lower paid positions that would provide under-represented minorities opportunities to advance their careers at the University? No. 3, is there a lack of under-represented minorities in leadership and supervisory positions?

On cultural competency, do faculty, staff, and students lack the cultural competency necessary to effectively engage, interact with, and serve the members of Baltimore’s diverse communities? On community service and engagement, there were several questions. Are students inadequately prepared for the University to work with and within Baltimore’s underserved communities? Are service projects and experiences developed without sufficient input from Baltimore’s communities? And does the debt load with which UMB students graduate act as a variable to pursuing lower paying career opportunities in urban and underserved communities?

I’m going to ask Dr. Stines and Dr. Fahie to address the DAC’s recommendations generated by these questions.

Elsie Stines, DNP, MS, CRNP: Career and professional advancement was one that seemed to generate the most comments. So that’s where I’ll start. As Dr. Perman mentioned, we heard frustration from some employees who feel that they had been passed over for promotions, that they haven’t been given the opportunities to advance, and that they have been denied these chances not based on their job performance, but based on their race or ethnicity.

And so we decided the first thing we need to do is to examine our track record when it comes to hiring under-represented minorities, promoting under-represented minorities, paying under-represented minorities fairly according to their job description and job responsibilities, and paying them equitably when compared to their non-minority colleagues.

We need a baseline assessment to gauge whether equity in recruitment, promotion, and salary is a problem at UMB, and if so, how widespread a problem it is. This personnel review is a comprehensive exercise that Human Resource Services (HRS) has already begun. 

Our second recommendation under career and professional advancement is to enhance the University’s efforts to promote a culture of diversity and inclusion. This is one of the things articulated in the University’s strategic plan, and, in fact, it’s the strategic plan that gives the Diversity Advisory Council oversight of your needs, diversity, and inclusion initiatives.

There are many components to this effort. For instance, appointing in each school an administrative unit, a senior-level faculty or staff member to work with the Diversity Advisory Council on diversity and inclusion initiatives, establishing and supporting these initiatives in each unit, and developing accountability mechanisms to assess our progress on outcomes.‌

We’ve made headway on a lot of these tactics, and we’re gearing up to implement more of them this year. I hope you’ll take time to look at the strategic plan and see what we’ve pledged to do. 

Our third recommendation is to evaluate the University’s job classification system and where necessary, modify it to create clearly defined career pathways and career development opportunities for all positions. This recommendation is in response to the fact that inequity takes root not only when people are unfairly passed over for promotions, but also when they haven’t been explicitly told what they need to do to get that promotion and what career development opportunities are available to them.

Vanessa Fahie, PhD, RN: Our next recommendations concern cultural competency. The first recommendation is to direct and adopt a statement of cultural competency, one that will form the foundation for the cultural competency initiative outlined in the strategic plan. It’s very obvious that we need a commonly understood definition of cultural competency before we can hold ourselves accountable for developing it, promoting it, and measuring it.

The second recommendation concerns ways we might go about enhancing and institutionalizing cultural competency. Examples include populating an online resource with scholarship, strategy, and best practices so that UMB’s employees can be effective leaders and educators in cultural competency.

Teaming up with our partner, UMMC, to promote cultural competency across both organizations as we bridge education and practice and actively engaging with the President’s Fellows in a discussion of cultural competency. The President’s Fellows are students from every school who, each year, research a topic we consider vital to institutional excellence and then recommend ways we can improve our practice. This year, the President’s Fellows will focus on cultural competency.‌

The final set of recommendations concerns community service and engagement. The first recommendation is to support the Office of Community Engagement in building a comprehensive, coordinated community engagement strategy for UMB. The Office of Community Engagement was established last summer to better coordinate the services we provide for our neighbors and to more clearly articulate to students, faculty, and staff where community engaged scholarship and service will have the greatest impact.

Our second recommendation is to support key components of a unified community engagement strategy. For example, orientations and professional development activities that foster highly effective engagement programs, a Universitywide day of service that raises students’ awareness of our service mission and introduces them to the work and benefits of thoughtfully conceived, thoughtfully coordinated community engagement, an effort to place the University inside the West Baltimore community with which we’re engaged, and a program that connects local residents with the University in an effort to secure steady jobs for them at UMB with legitimate opportunities for advancement.

Roger Ward, EdD, JD, MPA: I’d like to go into a bit more detail about some of the steps we’re beginning to take regarding these recommendations.

With respect to career and professional advancement, HRS has begun a very comprehensive review of the University’s recruitment practices, our promotion actions, our tenure actions, reclassifications and equity adjustments, and trying to determine whether under-represented minorities with respect to these actions are being disenfranchised here at the University as was suggested at the May forum. 

How we are approaching the analysis is we are looking at the last three fiscal years, and we’re looking across schools and administrative units. We’re looking at faculty and staff to determine what our actual practice has been and if there is a gap between what we are doing and what the perception is with respect to those actions.

From the last session the perception is that folks believe that under-represented minorities in particular are not being promoted, are not receiving regular adjustments at the same level as their non-minority colleagues. So we want to take a very close look at that, and that process has already begun. I should add, when we talk about under-represented minorities, we’re talking about gender as well. 

HRS will recommend to UMB senior leadership a new job classification system with a clearly defined career advancement pathway and career development opportunities for each position. What we are advocating is a broader job classification system where people who have similar jobs have more opportunity to advance within those job classifications so we’re not trying to fit square pegs into round holes, the square pegs being our employees and the round holes being very narrowly defined jobs that don’t quite match their experience, and expertise, and don’t really provide them with a career pathway. So we’re looking very closely at our job classification system. 

We’re also in the process, and this dovetails very nicely into our strategic plan, of mounting and launching an institutional-wide climate survey to see and hear very honestly what perceptions are related to diversity and inclusion, race, and gender on campus.

Unlike what a formal report might suggest, a climate survey collects perceptions. If you get up in the morning and the weather person says it’s cool outside and you go outside and you’re sweating like a pot cover, you will say I know what the forecast and the experts have said and it doesn’t match up to what I’m experiencing. So that’s what we will seek with the climate survey: a transparent, frank, confidential way for employees to share their perceptions of the University on these topics. We’re doing it externally so the integrity of the survey itself isn’t called into question.

Another item on tap this year as part of the strategic plan is to adopt a statement on cultural competency. Develop a clear statement of what cultural competency means to this University. We’ll also evaluate strategies for enhancing cultural competency, including the 2015-16 President’s Symposium and White Paper Project. 

The last thing is a very important one to us as an anchor institution, community service and engagement, and the central recommendation here is that we support the Office of Community Engagement and its programs that really benefit and advance our community service mission here at the institution. One of the things we think we need to do is to orient the students, and to a lesser extent the faculty and staff, on what it means to be civically engaged. We often bring our students to Baltimore from other states and countries and when they arrive they find Baltimore is a rather unique place.‌

And so before we send out these students for community engagement, we should orient them to the demographics of the city, the politics of the city, the neighborhoods of the city, the needs of the city. We also support a coordinated community engagement strategy that would include things like a Day of Service, which the University System is participating in, and ways to encourage other people in the institution to be involved in community service and engagement.

Another key recommendation, and this one too is already in the works, is establishing an Extension Center in the neighborhood. This is where we would engage very richly with the community, provide services in consultation with the community, support the community, and help build programs that empower the community and strengthen our relationship with the community.‌

One such program would be an Employment Readiness Program run by Human Resources where, for example, some HR representatives will work in the Extension Center to highlight jobs here on campus that the residential community might be eligible for. They could discuss applying for jobs with the residents and so forth. 

Lastly we have to look at the students’ increasing debt burden and whether that acts as a barrier to them pursuing lower paying career opportunities in urban and underserved communities when they graduate. We want them to be able to work for the public good.

Dr. Perman: What you’ve heard represents a lot of thoughtful work on the part of the Diversity Advisory Council. Again, I thank all the members for their commitment to the process and to bettering the institution. Now, this is not the end of our conversation. You’ll be able to follow our progress on these recommendations by visiting the DAC’s website.

I encourage you to stay involved and invested, and now we’re happy to open the floor to questions and comments.

Forum on Race Presentation‌

Q: All of your proposals sound really good, but I was wondering, how does that apply to the various affiliates? I work with UM Faculty Physicians. We manage the clinic. So we do the hiring and the management of the employees of the clinic, and I find that a lot of the corporate employees who are dental assistants or various positions in the different clinics, they work side by side with people who work for the state, and there’s a vast difference in their salary. So that’s one of the issues I think should be brought up.

Dr. Ward: Our recommendations, of course, are focused on UMB employees who are state employees. I believe the employees that you are talking about are a separate entity in and of themselves. We will have to consider how we address or begin to address those topics with the leadership of those units.

Comment: I wanted to just comment on what you said. I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I was a corporation assistant when I came in 1986 to 1988, and I’ve been a dental assistant at the dental school for almost 30 years. Within the University you should be compensated for the work you do whether you’re with a corporation or the state. There should be no in between. You have to count the time, the years, the experience, the department you work in, and classify the jobs accordingly.

Comment: I’m president of the Staff Senate, and I want to encourage everyone to contact us with issues that are important to you, such as those we’re discussing today. Our primary role on this campus is to advise leadership on issues that are important to staff. We have several mechanisms for how you can do that. We have our staff senators. You can go to our website. You can leave your name and your contact information if you’d like, but it’s also set up so you can do it anonymously. Let us know what those issues are so we can advocate for you.

Comment: I know your first name’s Jay, and I know your first name’s Roger, but I call you Dr. Perman and Dr. Ward out of respect. I call Mr. Rowan Mr. Rowan out of respect. Behind your name is a title and a degree that you earned. I work in the multi-trade shop. I’m a bricklayer by trade, and I earned my apprenticeship. My parents were immigrants. They taught me how to work with a shovel and in my department, that word respect is real important. In my department I see ‘I-I-I’. As a University and as a community, it should be ‘we’. 

Q: I work in Campus Life Services, an office that has programs that are open to the entire campus that deal with some of the issues we have talked about today. I would like to know how I can work better with the DAC or how they could work with me to make sure that people in this room know about these programs? How can we work together to promote this?

Dr. Perman: Speaking for Dr. Stines and Dr. Fahie, if I may, I’m sure they would love to invite you to come and present to the DAC. 

Q: I appreciate the fact you are moving toward promoting cultural diversity as evidenced by the strategic plan. My concern is that the strategic plan’s been in effect since 2011 and the fact that we’re only now undertaking a survey and addressing issues that to me should’ve been done in the first year so that, by this point, we could be moving forward with what has been found. So it seems as though this is being reactive instead of proactive. My concern is whether this is really something that we are going to move forward with. Or is it something we’re doing to appease people as opposed to being the leaders that we should be in the Baltimore community?

Dr. Perman: I appreciate your raising that question. Obviously, we don’t share a point of view. This is not reactive. This is a carrying out of a strategic plan over five years, By the way, the new strategic plan will get started this year, and it will be a continuum, but I’ll let Dr. Ward answer as well.

Dr. Ward: Thanks for raising that point because it allows me to clarify. Even though we cited tactics in the strategic plan that are set to begin in this final year that shouldn’t be heard as nothing under the strategic plan as it relates to diversity and inclusion wasn’t done. The strategic plan was a five-year plan and we had a number of tactics from year 1, year 2, year 3, up to year 5. The tactics that were highlighted here are the ones cued up for year 5. We don’t have time to discuss the tactics that happened in year 1, which included diversity and inclusion, for example, as evaluation criteria for all of the University’s leadership. When the president evaluates the deans and vice presidents, one of the criteria is what efforts are you making to look at the issue of diversity and inclusion within your school or within your administrative unit? That was done in year 1 so please don’t hear what I said as we are just starting. This is a continuation of what started in 2011. 

For more complete coverage, view the videos of the July 28 and the May 6 meetings.

Dr. Perman: The conversation we’re having today is a continuation of the one we started on May 6. That was the day we got together to talk about race in Baltimore. It was less than three weeks after the death of Freddie Gray, two weeks after his funeral.

And you’ll recall the funeral coincided with widespread rioting that broke out in our city, and we saw clearly, in stark relief, the decaying of our community. So we agreed that we would have a venue to ask challenging questions, a safe space for open dialogue, and we wanted and you wanted to set some momentum to map a path forward.

So that’s what we did that day, and I sat right here and listened for an hour and a half as our panelists, and then some of you, talked about racism, poverty, and disinvestment as it relates to the community in which we’re a part of, West Baltimore. We talked about what we are doing and what we can do to help restore equity, opportunity, and justice for those who have been denied a fair chance.

But as students, faculty, and staff took the microphone for comments, another piece of the conversation started to emerge, and that had to do with our own institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, our institutional commitment to meaningful community engagement and how to operationalize these principles in a way that brings healing to communities both inside and outside the University.

It was a candid conversation. It was emotional at times. There are some that talked about their own personal story within the University and the community, many of whom focused on the family as a whole, and it took a great deal of courage I know for people to speak freely about difficult and sometimes deeply personal issues. So I’m most appreciative on behalf of the leadership of the University to everyone who took part in that exchange.

That day I promised that we’d keep the conversation going. So I asked our Diversity Advisory Council to review the full transcript of the 90-minute conversation, which we videotaped, as is today’s, and to identify the issues that rose to the surface in that conversation and to provide me a set of recommendations on how to address those issues. Let me also add here that there’s a difference between listening and in some circumstances always agreeing with what is being said, and that’s where I as a leader have to take the final responsibility.

One of the first things the conversation revealed is that there are a lot of people on campus who don’t even know we have a Diversity Advisory Council (DAC). This is something that I organized shortly after I came back here, and I’m delighted to shine a spotlight on that group today. In a few minutes, I’ll be joined by the council’s chair, Dr. Elsie Stines, and vice chair, Dr. Vanessa Fahie, as they go through the group’s recommendations.

When I first returned to our campus, I had to decide whether I should have a chief diversity officer. I decided against it because I deeply believe that cultivating diversity can’t be the job of one person. It has to be suffused throughout the University.

We needed a bigger group of individuals with representation from across the University to advise me and the leadership on matters of diversity and to hold us accountable for institutionalizing it. In fact, that’s what’s in the strategic plan. Very recently, the diversity council expanded its membership to include more faculty and staff from each of the seven schools and to include representatives from the faculty, staff, and student senates. 

Today we’re also joined by my leadership colleague Dr. Roger Ward, who’s the University’s chief accountability officer and vice president. He’s taken on a number of roles recently, including that of interim chief human resources officer, which is obviously very important to some of this conversation.

The conversation is still in its early stages, and what we discuss this morning doesn’t necessarily represent a finality or totality of what we’ll undertake. As we listen to these recommendations, some of these need to be brought back to the senior leadership teams and to the shared governance mechanisms of this University. 

So let me get back to what the DAC found when members reviewed the May 6 transcript. The comments from students, faculty, and staff largely fell into three broad categories. Career and professional advancement, cultural competency, and community service and engagement. 

On the first theme, career and professional advancement, we heard frustration from some employees who believe that UMB is diverse but questioned how equitable and how inclusive we really are. So, our first question, are under-represented minorities, in particular African-Americans, routinely passed over for promotions and other advancement opportunities? No. 2, does the University lack clear career pathways, particularly in lower paid positions that would provide under-represented minorities opportunities to advance their careers at the University? No. 3, is there a lack of under-represented minorities in leadership and supervisory positions?

On cultural competency, do faculty, staff, and students lack the cultural competency necessary to effectively engage, interact with, and serve the members of Baltimore’s diverse communities? On community service and engagement, there were several questions. Are students inadequately prepared for the University to work with and within Baltimore’s underserved communities? Are service projects and experiences developed without sufficient input from Baltimore’s communities? And does the debt load with which UMB students graduate act as a variable to pursuing lower paying career opportunities in urban and underserved communities?

I’m going to ask Dr. Stines and Dr. Fahie to address the DAC’s recommendations generated by these questions.

Elsie Stines, DNP, MS, CRNP: Career and professional advancement was one that seemed to generate the most comments. So that’s where I’ll start. As Dr. Perman mentioned, we heard frustration from some employees who feel that they had been passed over for promotions, that they haven’t been given the opportunities to advance, and that they have been denied these chances not based on their job performance, but based on their race or ethnicity.

And so we decided the first thing we need to do is to examine our track record when it comes to hiring under-represented minorities, promoting under-represented minorities, paying under-represented minorities fairly according to their job description and job responsibilities, and paying them equitably when compared to their non-minority colleagues.

We need a baseline assessment to gauge whether equity in recruitment, promotion, and salary is a problem at UMB, and if so, how widespread a problem it is. This personnel review is a comprehensive exercise that Human Resource Services (HRS) has already begun. 

Our second recommendation under career and professional advancement is to enhance the University’s efforts to promote a culture of diversity and inclusion. This is one of the things articulated in the University’s strategic plan, and, in fact, it’s the strategic plan that gives the Diversity Advisory Council oversight of your needs, diversity, and inclusion initiatives.

There are many components to this effort. For instance, appointing in each school an administrative unit, a senior-level faculty or staff member to work with the Diversity Advisory Council on diversity and inclusion initiatives, establishing and supporting these initiatives in each unit, and developing accountability mechanisms to assess our progress on outcomes.

We’ve made headway on a lot of these tactics, and we’re gearing up to implement more of them this year. I hope you’ll take time to look at the strategic plan and see what we’ve pledged to do. 

Our third recommendation is to evaluate the University’s job classification system and where necessary, modify it to create clearly defined career pathways and career development opportunities for all positions. This recommendation is in response to the fact that inequity takes root not only when people are unfairly passed over for promotions, but also when they haven’t been explicitly told what they need to do to get that promotion and what career development opportunities are available to them.

Vanessa Fahie, PhD, RN: Our next recommendations concern cultural competency. The first recommendation is to direct and adopt a statement of cultural competency, one that will form the foundation for the cultural competency initiative outlined in the strategic plan. It’s very obvious that we need a commonly understood definition of cultural competency before we can hold ourselves accountable for developing it, promoting it, and measuring it.

The second recommendation concerns ways we might go about enhancing and institutionalizing cultural competency. Examples include populating an online resource with scholarship, strategy, and best practices so that UMB’s employees can be effective leaders and educators in cultural competency.

Teaming up with our partner, UMMC, to promote cultural competency across both organizations as we bridge education and practice and actively engaging with the President’s Fellows in a discussion of cultural competency. The President’s Fellows are students from every school who, each year, research a topic we consider vital to institutional excellence and then recommend ways we can improve our practice. This year, the President’s Fellows will focus on cultural competency.

The final set of recommendations concerns community service and engagement. The first recommendation is to support the Office of Community Engagement in building a comprehensive, coordinated community engagement strategy for UMB. The Office of Community Engagement was established last summer to better coordinate the services we provide for our neighbors and to more clearly articulate to students, faculty, and staff where community engaged scholarship and service will have the greatest impact.

Our second recommendation is to support key components of a unified community engagement strategy. For example, orientations and professional development activities that foster highly effective engagement programs, a Universitywide day of service that raises students’ awareness of our service mission and introduces them to the work and benefits of thoughtfully conceived, thoughtfully coordinated community engagement, an effort to place the University inside the West Baltimore community with which we’re engaged, and a program that connects local residents with the University in an effort to secure steady jobs for them at UMB with legitimate opportunities for advancement.

Roger Ward, EdD, JD, MPA: I’d like to go into a bit more detail about some of the steps we’re beginning to take regarding these recommendations.

With respect to career and professional advancement, HRS has begun a very comprehensive review of the University’s recruitment practices, our promotion actions, our tenure actions, reclassifications and equity adjustments, and trying to determine whether under-represented minorities with respect to these actions are being disenfranchised here at the University as was suggested at the May forum. 

How we are approaching the analysis is we are looking at the last three fiscal years, and we’re looking across schools and administrative units. We’re looking at faculty and staff to determine what our actual practice has been and if there is a gap between what we are doing and what the perception is with respect to those actions.

From the last session the perception is that folks believe that under-represented minorities in particular are not being promoted, are not receiving regular adjustments at the same level as their non-minority colleagues. So we want to take a very close look at that, and that process has already begun. I should add, when we talk about under-represented minorities, we’re talking about gender as well. 

HRS will recommend to UMB senior leadership a new job classification system with a clearly defined career advancement pathway and career development opportunities for each position. What we are advocating is a broader job classification system where people who have similar jobs have more opportunity to advance within those job classifications so we’re not trying to fit square pegs into round holes, the square pegs being our employees and the round holes being very narrowly defined jobs that don’t quite match their experience, and expertise, and don’t really provide them with a career pathway. So we’re looking very closely at our job classification system. 

We’re also in the process, and this dovetails very nicely into our strategic plan, of mounting and launching an institutional-wide climate survey to see and hear very honestly what perceptions are related to diversity and inclusion, race, and gender on campus.

Unlike what a formal report might suggest, a climate survey collects perceptions. If you get up in the morning and the weather person says it’s cool outside and you go outside and you’re sweating like a pot cover, you will say I know what the forecast and the experts have said and it doesn’t match up to what I’m experiencing. So that’s what we will seek with the climate survey: a transparent, frank, confidential way for employees to share their perceptions of the University on these topics. We’re doing it externally so the integrity of the survey itself isn’t called into question.

Another item on tap this year as part of the strategic plan is to adopt a statement on cultural competency. Develop a clear statement of what cultural competency means to this University. We’ll also evaluate strategies for enhancing cultural competency, including the 2015-16 President’s Symposium and White Paper Project. 

The last thing is a very important one to us as an anchor institution, community service and engagement, and the central recommendation here is that we support the Office of Community Engagement and its programs that really benefit and advance our community service mission here at the institution. One of the things we think we need to do is to orient the students, and to a lesser extent the faculty and staff, on what it means to be civically engaged. We often bring our students to Baltimore from other states and countries and when they arrive they find Baltimore is a rather unique place. 

And so before we send out these students for community engagement, we should orient them to the demographics of the city, the politics of the city, the neighborhoods of the city, the needs of the city. We also support a coordinated community engagement strategy that would include things like a Day of Service, which the University System is participating in, and ways to encourage other people in the institution to be involved in community service and engagement.

Another key recommendation, and this one too is already in the works, is establishing an Extension Center in the neighborhood. This is where we would engage very richly with the community, provide services in consultation with the community, support the community, and help build programs that empower the community and strengthen our relationship with the community.

One such program would be an Employment Readiness Program run by Human Resources where, for example, some HR representatives will work in the Extension Center to highlight jobs here on campus that the residential community might be eligible for. They could discuss applying for jobs with the residents and so forth. 

Lastly we have to look at the students’ increasing debt burden and whether that acts as a barrier to them pursuing lower paying career opportunities in urban and underserved communities when they graduate. We want them to be able to work for the public good.

Dr. Perman: What you’ve heard represents a lot of thoughtful work on the part of the Diversity Advisory Council. Again, I thank all the members for their commitment to the process and to bettering the institution. Now, this is not the end of our conversation. You’ll be able to follow our progress on these recommendations by visiting the DAC’s website.

I encourage you to stay involved and invested, and now we’re happy to open the floor to questions and comments.

Q: All of your proposals sound really good, but I was wondering, how does that apply to the various affiliates? I work with UM Faculty Physicians. We manage the clinic. So we do the hiring and the management of the employees of the clinic, and I find that a lot of the corporate employees who are dental assistants or various positions in the different clinics, they work side by side with people who work for the state, and there’s a vast difference in their salary. So that’s one of the issues I think should be brought up.

Dr. Ward: Our recommendations, of course, are focused on UMB employees who are state employees. I believe the employees that you are talking about are a separate entity in and of themselves. We will have to consider how we address or begin to address those topics with the leadership of those units.

Comment: I wanted to just comment on what you said. I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I was a corporation assistant when I came in 1986 to 1988, and I’ve been a dental assistant at the dental school for almost 30 years. Within the University you should be compensated for the work you do whether you’re with a corporation or the state. There should be no in between. You have to count the time, the years, the experience, the department you work in, and classify the jobs accordingly.

Comment: I’m president of the Staff Senate, and I want to encourage everyone to contact us with issues that are important to you, such as those we’re discussing today. Our primary role on this campus is to advise leadership on issues that are important to staff. We have several mechanisms for how you can do that. We have our staff senators. You can go to our website. You can leave your name and your contact information if you’d like, but it’s also set up so you can do it anonymously. Let us know what those issues are so we can advocate for you.‌

Comment: I know your first name’s Jay, and I know your first name’s Roger, but I call you Dr. Perman and Dr. Ward out of respect. I call Mr. Rowan Mr. Rowan out of respect. Behind your name is a title and a degree that you earned. I work in the multi-trade shop. I’m a bricklayer by trade, and I earned my apprenticeship. My parents were immigrants. They taught me how to work with a shovel and in my department, that word respect is real important. In my department I see ‘I-I-I’. As a University and as a community, it should be ‘we’. 

Q: I work in Campus Life Services, an office that has programs that are open to the entire campus that deal with some of the issues we have talked about today. I would like to know how I can work better with the DAC or how they could work with me to make sure that people in this room know about these programs? How can we work together to promote this?

Dr. Perman: Speaking for Dr. Stines and Dr. Fahie, if I may, I’m sure they would love to invite you to come and present to the DAC. 

Q: I appreciate the fact you are moving toward promoting cultural diversity as evidenced by the strategic plan. My concern is that the strategic plan’s been in effect since 2011 and the fact that we’re only now undertaking a survey and addressing issues that to me should’ve been done in the first year so that, by this point, we could be moving forward with what has been found. So it seems as though this is being reactive instead of proactive. My concern is whether this is really something that we are going to move forward with. Or is it something we’re doing to appease people as opposed to being the leaders that we should be in the Baltimore community?

Dr. Perman: I appreciate your raising that question. Obviously, we don’t share a point of view. This is not reactive. This is a carrying out of a strategic plan over five years, By the way, the new strategic plan will get started this year, and it will be a continuum, but I’ll let Dr. Ward answer as well.

Dr. Ward: Thanks for raising that point because it allows me to clarify. Even though we cited tactics in the strategic plan that are set to begin in this final year that shouldn’t be heard as nothing under the strategic plan as it relates to diversity and inclusion wasn’t done. The strategic plan was a five-year plan and we had a number of tactics from year 1, year 2, year 3, up to year 5. The tactics that were highlighted here are the ones cued up for year 5. We don’t have time to discuss the tactics that happened in year 1, which included diversity and inclusion, for example, as evaluation criteria for all of the University’s leadership. When the president evaluates the deans and vice presidents, one of the criteria is what efforts are you making to look at the issue of diversity and inclusion within your school or within your administrative unit? That was done in year 1 so please don’t hear what I said as we are just starting. This is a continuation of what started in 2011. 

For more complete coverage, view the videos of the July 28 and the May 6 meetings.

Read more in UMB News.