In an all-campus e-mail sent on Nov. 18, President Michael Roth introduced Making Excellence Inclusive (MEI), an initiative intended to promote discussion about institutional diversity. The initiative aims to focus on issues such as race, ethnicity, and gender. It will be conducted in collaboration with the Wesleyan Diversity Education Facilitation Program (WesDEF) and include the implementation of new programs to promote awareness of diversity on campus.

“Wesleyan has been known for at least 25 to 30 years as Diversity University,” Roth said. “But what does that mean in every facet of what we do? How are our policies around inclusion and affirmative action and co-curricular activities working together? In some areas, our numbers are not very impressive in regard to diversity…and so we want to understand what has been happening so we can increase our capacity to make authentic inclusion more of a reality.”

One of the primary objectives of the initiative is to facilitate, though not control, discussion regarding diversity and inclusion.

“We’re hoping that people will have many conversations about this at the grassroots level because people think they know what others are thinking, but they don’t,” said Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Rob Rosenthal. “Out of these many conversations with no set agenda will come a series of themes that the task force can then see. The conversations are the key, not the products that come out of it. If nothing else happens other than people have the chance to talk about what diversity and inclusiveness mean in their daily lives, that would be great.”

The initiative will be spearheaded by a presidential task force comprised of about 13 students, staff members, faculty members, and administrators. Leadership of the task force is shared between Rosenthal, Vice President for Institutional Partnerships and Chief Diversity Officer Sonia Mañjon, and Vice President for Student Affairs Michael Whaley.

The implementation of the initiative is the product of Mañjon’s careful study of diversity at Wesleyan since her arrival at the institution in 2008. The initiative is drawn from the American Association of Colleges and Universities and has already been implemented at other institutions nationwide.

“I feel that the students have done a really good job in keeping discourse about diversity front and center,” Mañjon said. “I think that the rest of the institution needs to be a little more visible on how we come to understand what diversity and inclusiveness mean within our various academic and nonacademic sectors. So I think this is the framework for us to really do that.”

The initiative features annual Affirmative Action Plans, which are federally mandated for any public or private institution or corporation that has contracts with the federal government. It requires keeping statistical data on ethnic diversity and plans for hiring, recruitment, and termination.

An Equity Scorecard will also be completed between spring 2011 and spring 2012. The scorecard is a method for institutions to analyze data that they already collect, which takes into account statistics for admissions as well as for hiring and recruitment of faculty and staff.

Although administrators say the initiative has been in the works for years and has been solidifying in the past few months, it comes at a time when diversity is already a popular point of discussion due to the controversial Cardinal Conservatives’ anti-affirmative action bake sale.

“The bake sale controversy demonstrated the need for Making Excellence Inclusive as an initiative,” Rosenthal said. “It revealed how far apart people are in what they think is appropriate and acceptable. Whatever our politics are, we have to allow others to state their politics without personalizing it, without name-calling. That doesn’t mean that all ideas, in my mind, are equally valid, but let’s slug it out. Let’s have a political discussion about the ideas in which all ideas can be voiced and let’s debate these ideas.”