UC San Diego

UC San Diego released an Anti-Racist Toolkit for students, staff, and faculty to encourage them in taking “some initial steps [they] can take right now to begin anti-racism work. Some of these steps include: (1) “get on email lists, go to events, volunteer to support, and or become a donor, (2) ask when you don’t know – but do the work first, (3) study the thought of women of color and queer people of color, (4) learn about social movements led by people of color and indigenous people past and present in the U.S. and around the world, (5) explore you own stake in collective liberation, (6) work to build relationships of trust and accountability with anti-racist organizations and communities of color, (7) being an ally/accomplice is different than simply wanting not to be racist, (8) study the history of white people working against racism, (9) find an anti-racist mentor who has more experience than you, (10) practice humility and receive feedback with an open mind, and (11) build intentional relationships with white activist or organizers.”

In April 2021, UC San Diego “launch[ed the] white allyship initiative to support anti-racism work.” This “new initiative aims to educate and support white campus community members in continuing anti-racism work at UC San Diego.” The goal in this is to “move from awareness to action by developing and deepening white ally capacity [by] identify[ing], engag[ing] and mitigate[ing] racism, and shar[ing] in the responsibility for creating an anti-racist campus.” The White Allyship, Action, and Accountability initiative “is open to people of all races and ethnicities, with a focus on how [their] white campus community members can organize, engage and partner to eliminate systemic racism.” To become an ally, one must listen and re-evaluate their own beliefs, take “action to dismantle systems of oppression; and consistently work together to advance equity for all races and ethnicities, with focus on how our white campus community members can organize, engage and partner to eliminate systemic racism.” The program beings “with an examination of the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that individuals hold [ultimately] contribut[ing] to the persistence of structural inequality and racism.” Next, to engage, expand, and inform one’s thinking participants “will learn key terminology and concepts to have constructive conversations that support anti-racism and ally work.” In fact, Bryce Besser, Senior Litigation Analyst with Environment, Health & Safety believes this “program as a vital component of creating culture of caring, equity, and understanding at UC San Diego because everyone – not just [their] Black, Native, Latinx, and other people of color – is needed to stamp out bias, prejudice and racism in our society.”

In October of 2020, the University of California at San Diego launched the Changemaker Institute which “serves as a supportive infrastructure to champion, oversee, and reinforce changemaking efforts throughout campus.” The Teaching + Learning Commons’ Engaged Teaching Hub recently announced its “call for proposals for UC San Diego Changemaker Fellows Anti-Racist Pedagogy Learning Community (CG-ARPLC). This program helps “bring faculty together as co-learners to recognize, discuss, and dismantle racist ideology.” Those who are selected to be a part of the CG-APRLC will receive a “$5,000 professional development grant for their participation in the Learning Community during Winter and Spring 2023 quarters.” During this time, “participants will critically examine their own teaching practices through a racial equity lens, build community with other participants committed to anti-racism, and learn about anti-racist teaching practices to promote the well-being and learning of students, particularly Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and minoritized students at UC San Diego.” Lastly, during this time participants will develop their own project to extend what they have learned “beyond their own classrooms and contribute to broader campus anti-racism efforts.” Applications are due November 27, 2022.

At UC San Diego, they have had a steady increase of Latinx and Chicanx students become a part of their undergraduate community. To meet the academic and cultural need of these students, UC San Diego “is hiring more than a dozen new faculty members whose research and teaching focus on affecting Latinx and Chicanx students.” These new hires are being bribed by a “$500,000 grant awarded through the University of California’s Advancing Faculty Diversity Program.” The desire to increase Latinx hires “aims to increase faculty diversity, spur innovation research and infuse culture into the curriculum” as a key part of UC San Diego’s Strategic Plan for Inclusive Excellence. Each of these new hires will teach “at least one novel course that aligns with the curricular requirement or electives within the two programs” (major or minor in Latin American Studies or a minor in Chicanx and Latinx Studies.)

In April of 2022, the UC San Diego Indigenous Futures Institute (IFI) received a $400,000 grant form Lumina Foundation’s Racial Justice and Equity Fund to further its work in “educational, scientific, and environmental co-design with indigenous people.” This grant will “continue [their] work in addressing economic, social, political, and educational inequalities impacting Indigenous communities, with fresh approaches centered on tribal sovereignty to promote self-reliance through self-determined futures.” More specifically, this grant will go to “support the Mat-koo-la-hoo-ee Project, a project that examines the history and cultural significance of the native land where UC San Diego is located, along with the Kumeyaay Water Craft Project and other programs including community-driven Dream Tanks and Action Labs.” In addition, this grant will help support the “engagement of Indigenous experts including an Elder-in-Residence, a Community Scholar-in-Residence and a Futurist-in-Residence, as well as the service of a part-time grant writer, allowing IFI to continue its trajectory of growth and expansion.” Lastly, the IFI also received a $125,000 grant from the Footprint Coalition “which it will use to reward its own $5,000 mini grants to teams of Indigenous Futurists working specifically on issues related to climate change and environmental health.”

In January of 2022, UC San Diego announced the Assessment for Advancing Equity Grants which is a “valuable practice that enables faculty to plan and implement program improvements and support student success.” These “curriculum-based assessments offer a powerful lever for advancing equity in [one’s] major.” The assessments were designed to continue “promoting student success and addressing opportunity gaps [as it is] vital to campus growth…” Academic units are able to request “up to $10,000 for one academic year to support assessment projects.”

Stanley Lo, associate professor of Biological Sciences and co-leader of University of California Hiring Interventions for Representation and Equity (HIRE) Alliance, leads the campuses of University of California in four “initiatives striving to diversity faculty and inspire a new generation of leaders.” The goal with this is to bridge the gap between the extremely diverse student population that makes up the UC system and the lack of diversity seen within the STEM teaching staff. The HIRE team was “awarded a $2.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program to implement a new model for equitable hiring of teaching professors in STEM.” The “AGEP UC HIRE Alliance hopes to have about ten AGEP faculty fellows per year from different STEM disciplines across the four campuses.” Those hired will “meet regularly to understand the barriers for equity, diversity, and inclusion in faculty searches, especially in relation to the teaching profession.” Overall, AGEP UC HIRE hopes the effort put into creating a more diverse teaching faculty will translate into creating a “process that can be applied to a wide range of faculty positions and search committees beyond the University of California.”

Chancellor introduced a “21-day Challenge” centering around “power, position, privilege, perception, and process.”

At UC San Diego, the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) “is committed to building individual and departmental capacity to address barriers to success for our underrepresented faculty, staff, and students, to further [their] efforts towards inclusive excellence and foster a more welcoming and supportive campus climate.” On this page, they offer numerous different resources to help “support personal edification and discussions with students, collogues, and teams regarding racism.”

Dr. Eddie Moore Jr., diversity scholar, designed a 21-Day Anti-Racism Challenge to “promote deeper understandings of race, power, privilege, supremacy, and oppression.” This challenge was designed to foster habit building to build “effective social justice habits to effect meaningful change.” Through this challenge UC San Diego will “explore anti-racism as a means to help one another begin to identity and confront the structural and behavioral norms that perpetuate civil injustice and systemic racial inequality.” Their goal within this is to “assist everyone in furthering their awareness, compassion, understanding, and engagement towards anti-racism, with a focus on anti-Blackness and the experience of Black people in America.” Overall, this challenge “invites participants to complete a curriculum of 21 short assignments, including readings, videos, and podcast, grounded in social justice framework that situates structures of power, privilege, perception, and process."

At UC San Diego Student Affairs vision is to “empower students to discover and achieve their dreams [by] creat[ing] an inclusive and collaborative student-centered university that champions student success and well-being in [their] global society.” Their core values include: “inclusivity, personal growth and engagement, well-being, accountability, and excellence.” 

In the later part of 2019, UC San Diego announced their new five-year strategic plan that would “guide the work of [their] division and ensure [they] focused on the most critical areas for current and future students.” This plan key pillars are: (1) “remaining student-centered, (2) addressing racism and anti-blackness, and (3) the health and safety of the Triton community.” Their goals within this plan are to: (1) “provide a student experience that prepares all students to address the needs and challenges of a diverse and changing world, (2) leverage innovation, global interactions, changemaking, and technology to advance student learning beyond the classroom, (3) reimagine programs and practices to encourage students and staff to live more balanced, active lives, (4) review existing programs and policies to inform the development and enhancements of new and current initiatives that advance inclusion for underserved student populations inside and outside the classroom, and (5) identify and engage campus partners, students, and faculty to collaborate on student-centered initiatives.”

UC San Diego published Anti-Racist and Inclusive Linguistics Pedagogy which is a resource for faculty to learn how to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion within their classrooms. On this particular page, it discusses how to design your syllabus in way to “express [their] commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The teaching hub explains that one’s “syllabus sets the tone for the class and for your relationship with [their] students, [therefore] course practices and policies should be equitable and responsive to the different needs and lived experiences of students. Overall, being “explicit about policies up front can help to avoid inequalities among students.”

On UC San Diego’s teaching hub, it suggests faculty reform their assessment and grading policies to emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion. One way to do this would to not “penalize students for their learning process, [but instead,] suggest allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge their knowledge in ways that work for them.” Overall, they encourage faculty to “emphasize learning and creating the conditions for learning over grades.” For example, they have encouraged professors to “grade for content rather than form, register, or style [by] removing all rubric elements that enforce standardized language use or privilege certain language varieties or registers over others.”

In UC San Diego’s teaching hub, it explains that “anti-racist pedagogy is not simply incorporating racial content into courses, curriculum, and disciple. It is also about how one teacher, even in courses where race is not the subject matter. It begins with the faculty’s awareness and self-reflection of their social positions and leads to the application of this analysis not just their teaching, but also in their discipline, research, and departmental, university, and community work.” In this, UC San Diego has explicitly outlined “necessary anti-racist and inclusive topics for every linguistics course including indigenous languages, minoritized Englishes, multilingualism, and sign language.”

In June of 2022, “a record number of [UC San Diego] graduates who identity as LGBTQIA+ gathered to celebrate the completion of their UC San Diego degree” at an event entitled Rainbow Graduation. At this event each “graduate was recognized individually, including details about their UC San Diego involvement and future plans, and received a certificate and rainbow-colored tassel to embellish their caps at All Campus Commencement.”

In May of 2022, UC San Diego recommitted themselves to carrying out their work regarding gender recognition and lived names. UC San Diego announced they would be “establishing an Implementation Task Force with a charge to ensure [their] compliance with the UC Presidential Policy on Gender Recognition and Lived Names.” The implementation of these changes will ensure the “dignity and well-being of all members of [their] diverse community, and will offer transgender, intersex, and nonbinary Tritons even greater recognition and inclusion on [their] campus.”

On July 1, 2022, Victor Ferreira “was appointed as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (AVC-FEDI).” As AVC-FEDI, Ferreira will work in direct correlation with “Director of Center for Faculty, Diversity, and Inclusion (FDI) and collaborate with other units, including Academic Personnel Services (APS), deans Academic Senate and others, to provide academic leadership and direction in advancing the University’s goal of achieving and sustaining equity, diversity, and inclusion for all faculty at UC San Diego.” In addition, Ferreira will be responsible for “supporting best practices for fair and inclusive searches; professional development and other activities that enhance academic success and equitable advancement; consulting for departmental and divisional leaders; and providing leadership to improve the climate for all academic employees at UC San Diego.”

On June 1, 2022, Frank A. Silva was “appointed as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (AVC-EDI).” As AVC-EDI, Silva will be responsible for “strategic planning, advancing institutional effectiveness, serving as liaison to Human Resources, and leading diversity focused community engagement and campus-wide initiatives.” Lastly, “as a member of the leadership team, [Silva] will represent VC-EDI on high-level task forces, advisory groups, and system-wide work groups.”

On June 16, 2022, from 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm, UC San Diego’s Black Staff Association (BSA) hosted their second annual Juneteenth celebration. At this year’s celebration, UC San Diego came together virtually to commemorate the “vibrancy and creativity of Black culture and express appreciation for the Black Excellence exemplified across campus.” The BSA “encourages everyone at UC San Diego to take time to reflect on our country, its treatment of Black people, and to consider how [their] UC San Diego commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion can help unite our diverse society to explore and find solutions to end systematic racism and anti-blackness.”

On April 1, 2022, UC San Diego Black Resource Center welcomed newly admitted Black triton families at their annual Black Family Get Together. This event is just one of many events hosted by the Black Student Union (BSU) and Black Resource Center (BRC) between March 31 and April 5. During this time, the BSU and BRC invited newly Black students and their families to a variety of events such as in-person Triton Day and virtual events that ranged from “meeting current students within Black Greek Letter Organizations to learning about student support services such as the African Black Diaspora Living-Learning Community.” Cofield, one of the co-chairs of the Black Student Union, believes it’s highly “important to offer perspective students and families the chance to explore the campus and realize it is a safe space to live and learn.” During this event, Professor of Educational Studies Thandeka Chapman joined to share about the launch of the new Black Diaspora and African American Studies major. The goal within this major is to “help students understand the critical spaces Black people hold in society culturally, politically, economically, and socially.

In March of 2022, UC San Diego “hosted social justice advocate, civil rights activist and author Cornel West for a lively discussion about channeling anger over injustice into strength and a catalyst for positive change.” Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla believes that “as an institution, the more [they] can facilitate these conversations and keep these conversations going, the more inclusive, diverse, and equitable [they] will be.” During West’s talk, he discussed “the power of words and how young people can become changemakers who use their ideas to shift the tide [by drawing] on his research focused on race, gender, and class in American society.”

In February of 2022, UC San Diego hosted its Triton Leaders Conference where they discussed “Wise Words: Four Steps to Becoming an Ally.” During this segment, UC San Diego Alumni and the Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion invited Tim Wise “to deliver a keynote talk on how to become an effective ally.” The four wise words Tim shared were: (1) “make allyship a verb, (2) make a genuine connection with whom you are serving as an ally, (3) be hard on systems and soft on people, and (4) use active language.” Lastly, the talk concluded with how to get started as an ally where UC San Diego shared tips of how to being one’s “opportunity to lead in [their] spheres of influence” and strengthen one’s role as an ally.

February 4-5, 2022, UC San Diego invites alumni, students, faculty, staff and community members to join them at Triton Leaders Conference to “continue advancing the work to build a more equitable and inclusive world.” At this years’ conference, attendees will “dive into workshops and lectures focused on the theme “Allyship: Achieving Inclusive Excellence.” This event was coordinated by the “UC San Diego Alumni Office [to put on a] conference [that] explores how allyship plays a critical role on the journey toward cultivating a more inclusive community where everyone can thrive.” At this year’s conference, Tim Wise, “prominent anti-racist writer, educator, and commentator,” will be the keynote speaker. In addition, event organizers have “curated five breakout sessions featuring student/alumni panels and thought leaders throughout the weekend, covering topics such as equity in healthcare, allyship in the workplace and cultivating inclusivity.” Lastly, the conference will conclude with the announcement of “2022 True Triton Honorees, [which is] among UC San Diego’s highest honors, recognizing and thanking alumni volunteers for their dedication and service to the university.”