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Florida International University

Undergraduate School

Mailing Address
P.O. Box 659003
Miami, Florida 33265
Phone
(305) 348-7000
Email address
OneStop@fiu.edu
School Information
"For over four decades, FIU has positioned itself as one of South Florida's anchor institutions by solving some of the greatest challenges of our time. We are dedicated to enriching the lives of the local and global community. With a student body of nearly 54,000, we are among the top 10 largest universities in the nation and have collectively graduated more than 200,000 alumni, 115,000 of whom live and work in South Florida" (Source: https://www.fiu.edu/about/index.html). The university offers over 130 online degrees and its student to faculty ratio is 25 to 1.
General Information
Following the death of George Floyd, FIU has taken action through the Equity Action Initiative, a product of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Division. This initiative involves the creation of new roles, training for faculty, and police reform. FIU also followed this with a Faculty Senate Resolution which seeks to incorporate a required course on racism for all students. See developments below:

Actions Taken

Admissions Policies
  • The Equity Action Initiative has called upon FIU to become Test Flexible and hopes to eventually eliminate the use of standardized testing. Along this line of strategy, the university has implemented the programs of "The Education Effect," which offers test preparations to future admits, and "Golden Scholars," which is an "alternative admissions program for under-represented students."
  • FIU's Minority State College Transfer Scholarship is "designed for students who are transferring from a community college and would have completed their Associate’s degree between January – August of the application year."
  • The mission of the Center for Diversity and Student Success in Engineering and Computing is to "[r]ecruit highly diverse, top students from South Florida and beyond to our college and FIU through outreach in STEM and pre-college opportunities."
Anti-Racism, Bias, and Diversity Training
  • The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Executive will offer training for students, faculty, and staff which will "ensure that future and current practitioners are culturally informed and are poised to provide culturally informed and responsive care."
  • FIU will now offer Micro-Credentials where participants will "discover key terms and definitions as well as gain a fundamental understanding of concepts related to social justice." The scope of such programs will involve "teaching, learning, and unlearning the subject matters of racism, bigotry, and implicit bias." These programs include the Fundamentals of Social Justice Badge and the Community Policing Micro-Certificate.
  • As of 2020, FIU's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion outlined its Equity Action Initiative Proposal which includes an initiative titled "Micro-credentials" and is described as follows: "Learners will discover key terms and definitions as well as gain a fundamental understanding of concepts related to social justice."
  • FIU's Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion published its 2020-2022 DEI Annual Report titled "You Belong Here," which states that "The Office of Global Learning Initiatives (OGLI) focused efforts to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion as a key component of its programs...the staff engaged in rich exploration of identity, race, and culture through periodic discussions across a 21-day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge with the YWCA of South Florida."
  • FIU's Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion published its 2020-2022 DEI Annual Report titled "You Belong Here," which states that the Division is "Creating a comprehensive institution-wide learning plan for the FIU community tailored and designed to focus on unconscious bias and cultural competence across the diversity spectrum..."
  • FIU's Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion published its 2020-2022 DEI Annual Report titled "You Belong Here," which states that the "FIU Office to Advance Women, Equity, and Diversity (AWED) provided research-based educational diversity, equity and inclusion training for the academic workplace and beyond" which included "...an immersive and interactive 8-hour training on gender and race bias" for faculty and leadership at FIU.
Curriculum Changes and Requirements
  • FIU's Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion published its 2020-2022 DEI Annual Report titled "You Belong Here," which states that "the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management has created the first ever endowed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion professorship, presented to Professor Brian Barker, with the goal of developing DEI curriculum and creating a pathway to success for underrepresented talent in the hospitality industry."
Disciplinary Measures
  • FIU's "incident reporting" website "guides you in sharing important information with university offices tasked with addressing and responding to student concerns, student and academic misconduct, discrimination, harassment, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the FIU community."
Program and Research Funding
  • FIU will create the "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at FIU Challenge." This is an optional program that would provide faculty with resources for inclusive teaching and how to "incorporate diverse content into the curriculum."
  • On June 24, 2020, the university passed a Faculty Senate Resolution on "Racial, Social, and Community Justice." The resolution entails creating the Athalie Range Center for Racial, Social, and Community Justice which will seek to create a required "racial and social justice" course. This initiative also hopes to incorporate "implicit bias training." Additionally, the resolution will create scholarships for "students working towards social and racial justice."
  • The Florida Action for Minorities in Engineering (FLAME) is a “joint program between Miami-Dade County Public Schools, M-DCPS, and FIU." Through the Center for Diversity and Student Success in Engineering and Computing, "the program is designed for minority high school students and provides a unique educational experience in the field of Engineering.”
  • Through the College of Engineering and Computing, the Justice Equity Diversity Inclusion (JEDI) program includes "interview studies with marginalized engineers to promote awareness of their experiences with faculty, institutional data and survey study on gateway courses to address attrition issues, creation and evaluation of a [sic] programs for recruiting underrepresented student groups."
Re-Imagining Policing
  • Within the Equity Action Committee, FIU created the Police Reform Committee which focus on "adopting standards to reduce immediate harm and restrict the use of force," among various other goals. This committee will require training to promote these goals. Additionally, the FIU police department will not permit chokeholds or strangleholds and will require "a verbal warning in all situations before using deadly force."
  • As of 2020, FIU's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion outlined its Equity Action Initiative Proposal which includes "initiatives intended to advance training, promote community policing, support diversity efforts, examine alternative controlling techniques, and create a more rigorous and comprehensive apparatus for reporting misconduct."
Resources
  • The DEI Division will be hiring and appointing individuals for the new roles of Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion/Chief Diversity Officer; Director of Diversity Branding, Communication, and Marketing; Advisors of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in each program; and Council of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
  • The university also seeks to implement more rigorous mentoring for students and faculty.
  • FIU published an academic paper titled "Critical Race Theory: Focusing the Lens on Human Resource Development," which begins with the following abstract: "The challenge that continues to face HRD is how to integrate real concerns for diversity into programs, practices, and research. Critical race theory was used as a lens to examine work on diversity published in Human Resource Development Quarterly (HRDQ)."
  • The FIU Libraries Academic and Intellectual Freedom webpage provides a list of Critical Race Theory readings including "Anti-Racist Educational Leadership and Policy" and "On Critical Race Theory."
  • FIU published a Carnegie Mellon University scholarly paper from July 13, 2021, titled "Critical Race Pedagogy for More Effective and Inclusive World Language Teaching," which states, "To address racial inequity and the exclusion of African Americans in applied linguistics, second-language acquisition, and world language (WL) education, our field must reckon with social justice problems of racism and anti-Blackness."
  • As of 2020, FIU's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion outlined its Equity Action Initiative Proposal which includes "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the Classroom: A Holistic Vision for Change." This initiative "Outlines details for a data driven, systemic and developmental pathway toward equitable outcomes for Black students at FIU."
  • FIU has several affinity groups which are "formed and operated by employees on a voluntary basis" and include the "Black Faculty Association" and "Black Staff Association."
  • As of 2024, "in compliance with Section 1004.06, Florida Statutes, and Florida Board of Governors Regulation 9.016," FIU announced that "the Office to Advance Women, Equity and Diversity (AWED) has been closed."
  • As of 2024, FIU has issued the following announcement regarding its DEI Office: "In keeping with State of Florida legislation, the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has been eliminated. FIU remains committed to cultivating an environment of accessibility and equal opportunity, where all are welcomed to learn, earn, and thrive."
Symbolic Actions
  • In response to the death of George Floyd, FIU's Equity Action Initiative produced the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Division. This division's "urgent work is around addressing systemic racism and unconscious/conscious bias against Black people."
  • Christopher F. Rufo summarized the various steps that FIU has taken to incorporate DEI and CRT into the school since the death of George Floyd. The school's DEI officials "steadily operationalized the principles of critical race theory and created a vast web of programming that wraps this ideology into nearly every process of academic life" which includes but is not limited to segregation and CRT in scholarships, programs, hiring, and curriculum topics.
  • FIU's School of Social Work issued a statement on racism which stated the following: "We are writing to acknowledge and condemn the recent acts of anti-Black racist police violence. We express our collective anger and pain as we are all witnesses to these injustices. We recognize that these horrific events are part of a long history of anti-Black racist violence in this country. We are robbed of our full humanity and dignity when systems are rooted in and perpetuate white supremacy."
  • The purpose of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is to "enhance diversity and inclusion by prioritizing through the areas that can effect change and align CEE with the Vision of the College and the University."
  • FIU's College of Arts, Sciences, and Education issued a Diversity Statement which reads in part as follows: "We recognize that diversity enriches our experiences of our varied objects of analysis, be they literary, theoretical, filmic, linguistic, or otherwise...This commitment stems not only from our intellectual and philosophical investments in the diversity of the human experience, but also in recognition of FIU’s unique status as the largest minority-serving institution in the State of Florida, and the largest Hispanic Serving Institution in the United States."
Last updated April 29th, 2024
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