Lisa Lynch, dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, formed a Diversity Steering Committee this month to address issues of diversity at the Heller School after the school's strategic plan, completed over summer 2011, recommended that the committee be formed.

The committee comprises students, staff, faculty and alumni, with Prof. Anita Hill (Heller) serving as its chair.

The objective, according to the strategic plan, is in part to "recruit a more diverse faculty, research staff, and administration to match its student body, its programs and its mission."

In order to accomplish this and further enhance the school's focus on diversity, the plan recommends that the committee be formed to "develop programs, policies and procedures that will permanently embed equity, inclusion, and diversity in the fabric of Heller's academic and work environment."

Hill said in an interview with the Justice that she would look at the broadest definition of diversity available. The strategic plan and an email from Lynch to the Heller community indicate that diversity includes "racial, gender, sexual orientation and identity, national origin, ethnic, socioeconomic and intellectual" factors.

"One of the things that was absolutely clear was that our work on social policy and management needed to take on the issue of how we develop policy, how we do our research and how we prepare our students to interact with the issues of a diverse population," said Hill.

Hill stressed the broad scope of the word "diversity" and its relation to the Heller School.

She said the committee plans "to study diversity in terms of not only in the makeup of our student body, faculty and staff but also to look at diversity in terms of our research and teaching."

Dr. Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson '80 M.A '06 Ph.D. '06, who will serve on the committee, said "My sense is that we will be focusing on a number of different areas, which would include student and faculty diversity as well as faculty development in reference to equity and diversity, curriculum review and development as well."

Jessika Zimmerer, a second-year master's student in social policy and women's and gender studies at Heller, stressed that students have been organizing for at least the past five years to discuss issues of diversity of students, faculty and curriculum. Last year, she helped form an ad-hoc student diversity working group.

"It was our intent to push for more integrated discussions about the intersection of race, class, gender, religion—all of those—in each of our classes," she said.

Diversity is "not ever going to be finished," said Zimmerer. "The bigger issue to me is in terms of curriculum, there is not a lot of focus on diversity."

Both Hill and Lynch said that, though this committee specifically focuses on diversity within the Heller School, it is not entirely separate from the University as a whole. Lynch said the committee could be helpful in a University-wide discussion of diversity.

Hill also chairs the Provost's Steering Committee on Campus Diversity Issues and is a senior adviser to Goldstein.

"I do have a variety of roles, and I'm involved in the strategic plan of the University. I think that all of those things work together. We are not looking at diversity as something that is separate and apart from anything else that we do. It is part of who we are," said Hill.