It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice website!

Since joining the University, I have witnessed excitement and passion from students, faculty, and staff for achieving our aspirational goal of becoming a more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist institution.

The work of making UConn a more justice-oriented and anti-racist institution requires all of us to participate.  The Office for Diversity and Inclusion, which includes our seven cultural centers and programs and a dedicated group of change agents, is here to help fulfill this chief component of our University values.  However, we cannot do this work alone – significant progress requires that all our institutional leaders and partners are responsible for taking on and enacting the University’s DEIJ-related priorities where every member of the community joins in.

This Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice website provides a starting point for that work.  Making our campus spaces more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just requires that we first start with a common language for what these values mean, as well as a common understanding of what this work looks like and can achieve.  This DEIJ website will help the UConn community in these areas, providing language, resources, and tools that each of us can use in transforming our campuses.

We recognize, however, that promises about making our campus more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and ring hollow if they are not backed up with action.  While this website contains a celebration of the diversity that makes our campus strong and provides tools for making it even stronger, it also will provide transparency about the challenges our campuses face and the success of the actions our community is taking to meet those challenges.  We will routinely update this website with data that measure the efficacy of our programming; we will use this data to provide transparency and to develop more intentional approaches to advancing the critical work of DEIJ.

Overall, my hope for this website is that it will celebrate the rich diversity which makes us stronger as an institution; that it will honor those brave students, faculty, and staff who fight to bring about further change at UConn and society more broadly; and that it will document our journey to becoming a more justice-oriented and anti-racist institution.

 

Sincerely,

Dr. Frank Tuitt
Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer