Celebration of Inclusive Excellence

Several people from the UCI Libraries attended yesterday’s event from the Office of Inclusive Excellence to ‘Celebrate Inclusive Excellence’ (mentioned previously in this space). The goal of the event was to describe some of the resources available at UCI, and also to talk specifically about sexual harassment and DACA—both highly topical subjects. The form the event took was as follows:

• an introduction by Doug Haynes, Vice Provost for Academic Equity, Diversity & Inclusion;
• a talk by Michele Goodwin, Chancellor’s Professor of Law, describing the situation that led her to write the piece Complicit Bias: Sexual Harrassment and Communities that Sustain it;
• a talk by Theresa Truman, Assistant Director/Deputy Title IX Officer in the Office of Equal Opportunity & Diversity. She described resources available at UCI for faculty, staff and students who are dealing with discrimination or harassment;
• a panel discussion including Truman; Oscar Teran, Director of the Dreamers Resource Center, which provides assistance to undocumented immigrants; and a graduate student who is in the DACA program (whose name I didn’t write down).

There were a couple of common threads running through all part of the program, including the fact that all of the discussion in the room was to an extent ‘preaching to the choir’. Here are two facts that I thought worth repeating:

• The Dreamers Resource Center here on campus provides free legal assistance not just to students, but also to the student’s immediate family, based on the fact that students perform much better academically when they come from a stable family situation (ie, not one in which their parents are getting deported without legal assistance)
• At UCI, students who are eligible for DACA are 60% Latino, 30% Asian and Pacific Islander (mostly South Korean), and 10% rest of the world (ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to western European backgrounds)

I thought the event was excellent, though it highlighted the perhaps overly broad remit of the OIE. But I found it very interesting to hear from both Teran and from the graduate student. I find it difficult to imagine the fundamental everyday problems that an undocumented person (either adult or student) faces, because I have been lucky enough to have never dealt with any of these issues—or indeed immigration in any respect. So I (and, I think, most Americans) don’t have any experience with the challenges that most immigrants face—never mind the additional ones faced by those who are undocumented.

The panel discussion did a great job of showing how difficult otherwise straightforward aspects of life can be. So for instance, the student mentioned that when thinking of applying to graduate programs, the fact that most grants in her field are administered by federal agencies meant that she was not eligible for them—and thus was unable for the funding that allows graduate study. Thus she changed her course of study due to the fact that she was able to find professors in one subject who were willing to work with her on finding funding, while that wasn’t possible in the field she was primarily interested in after she got her BS.

I’m sorry that I took no pictures; I will do better next time!