Barnard College Barnard College
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Council’s Charge

The following four principal responsibilities, drafted by the President’s Task Force on Diversity in April 2017, charge the Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with the following:

  • Expanding the dialogue about diversity, inclusion, and equity to include the entire Barnard community of students, faculty, staff, and alumnae.
  • Promoting and coordinating campus-wide participation in the College’s diversity and inclusion efforts.
  • Managing and monitoring the implementation of recommendations from the President’s Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion.
  • Advising Barnard’s senior leadership on ongoing and new initiatives that create a more diverse and inclusive campus community.

    Membership

    The Council meets monthly. Members include students, faculty members, exempt and nonexempt staff, alumnae, trustees, and an ex officio member from the President’s staff.

     

    Prioritized Goals

    1. Expanding the dialogue about diversity, inclusion, and equity: The Council will concentrate early efforts on input and outreach to the larger Barnard community. It is tasked with understanding how the College can best support all members of the campus community and promote the representativeness of the student body, faculty, and staff. Following from this, the Council will develop strategies for communicating its findings to the broader community, along with providing timely information about relevant campus-wide activities.
    2. Creating a structure for reviewing proposals from the community: The Council will articulate a structure, timeline, and budget for evaluating proposals for campus-wide initiatives for enhancing diversity and inclusion coming from students, faculty, staff, and alumnae, including the criteria for accepting proposals, and the scale and timing of events on campus. Leveraging its reach to all community constituents, the Council will prioritize initiatives or proposals that reflect the desires of the Barnard community most broadly.
    3. Organizing campus-wide events: The Council will develop a plan (including timeline, budget, potential speakers, themes, and structure) for two connected events to be organized each year, including an annual “Grace Lee Boggs Lecture” and a cultural event, that are accessible to all members of the community. 

     

    DEI Council Grant 

    Each year, Barnard faculty, staff, and students are invited to submit proposals that will help foster inclusion, belonging, and equity in our community. Ideas may include speakers and performances; seminars and workshops; gatherings that bring together distinct constituencies for discussion and relationship building; as well as other programming and initiatives.

    Click here to learn more.

     

    Accessibility Week 2022

    The Office of DEI and the Diversity Council are excited to invite all Barnard community members to the second annual Accessibility Week, which will take place from March 21-25, 2022. Accessibility is everyone's responsibility, and Accessibility Week is a week of community-wide programming focused on disability inclusion and social justice. RSVP to any or all the week's events via this link. If you need individual disability-related accommodations for any event in order to be able to attend, we encourage you to inform us in advance, but ideally no later than March 18, 2022, in order for us to accommodate you. Possible accommodations can include ASL interpretation, accessible materials, and more. To make an individual accessibility request, please fill out the Event Accessibility Request Form.

    Special thanks to our partners:  Beyond Barnard, BLAIS, CARDS, IMATS, Computational Science Center, and the Francine A. LeFrak Center for Well-Being