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Media Relations

Bloomington Herald-Times Articles

January 16, 2009

IU awards funding for 12 diversity projects systemwide
Grants vary from $29,000 to $122,000; all but one IU campus gets at least one
By Nicole Brooks
January 16, 2009

Twelve proposals to boost the diversity of Indiana University's students, faculty and professional staff will receive funding through an initiative created by president Michael McRobbie.

McRobbie had announced in September that a total of $1 million would be available to the best proposals from any academic unit from any IU campus on how to diversify the university. Twelve of the 22 finalists were announced as winners Thursday.

The Bloomington campus claims five funded projects, while every campus except Fort Wayne's has at least one diversity project receiving new money.

The grants range from $29,000 to $122,000, and projects are funded for one, two or three years, according to the university.

The overriding focus of most of the projects will be recruitment of minority undergraduate and graduate students, said Edwin Marshall, IU vice president for diversity, equity and multicultural affairs.

Marshall chaired the 10-member committee that rated the proposals and recommended 12 to the president for funding.

An "incidental benefit" to this process has been the resulting spirit of collaboration among people at the university, Marshall said. "We saw academic departments talking to each other, schools talking to other schools. It helps create a certain level of energy around the topic of diversity."

Bloomington's projects include:

An expansion of mentoring programs through the Hudson and Holland Scholars Program and the Office of Mentoring Services and Leadership Development.

Increasing faculty diversity by building on the Future Faculty Teaching Program.

Establishing a first-year seminar for students that provides peer mentors and "diversity-related professional development."

Marshall said the projects both showcase new ideas and build on established courses of action: "There's some that are looking at expanding, maybe taking a different approach. When you really think about it, there may not be a whole lot of new ideas out there. It's restructuring old ideas, giving them new energy."

For instance, he said, chemistry department projects, one to recruit minority students into sciences and one to establish relationships with historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic serving institutions and tribal colleges, are not necessarily "out-of-the-box" ideas.

But, they will be given new life. "Some of that may have been going on, but probably to a very small degree due to lack of resources," Marshall said.

A majority of the projects are three years in length, but funds are dispersed a year at a time. Each proposal included benchmarks for success, and those benchmarks must be met before the next year's funds are released, he said.

Additional staff won't be hired, Marshall said.

According to IU enrollment data, in fall 2008, 6.8 percent of IU students system-wide, were African American. American Indians made up 0.3 percent, Asian Americans 3.1 percent and Hispanic students 3 percent.

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