by Rebecca Karoff, University of Texas System, and Dewayne Morgan, University System of Maryland
Rebecca: I’ve been working in university systems my entire professional life (decades, in fact) and these days, my fulcrum for engaging in equity is the newly issued NASH Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism:
NASH recognizes that state systems of higher education have a particular responsibility to confront longstanding systemic inequity and visibly stand for the values of inclusive excellence. In addition to identifying and removing barriers to equity, systems and their constituent campuses should be anti-racist. By definition, systemic and institutionalized problems have to be tackled by systems and the institutions in them—explicitly and head-on.
It captures the essential role of public higher education systems and grounds it in the particular historical moment we are in.
Dewayne: Yes, university systems are more than just convenient collections of colleges and universities. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This Aristotle-attributed quote most surely reflects the shared philosophy of the forty-one NASH university systems, collectively serving millions of students across the country.
NASH’s newly launched Equity Action Framework was designed to be an accessible tool that helps Systems elevate their commitments to equity and promotes explicit and sustained engagement with nine essential equity practice areas. The Framework challenges users to look deeply into the mirror to examine and act on the role of university systems in addressing institutionalized systemic inequities, however unintentional, within our colleges and universities that so many have worked hard and long to make bastions of student access, opportunity and success.
Rebecca: Looking in the mirror can be painful! Grounded as it is in guiding questions, the Equity Action Framework provides a compass. Many in higher education have worked hard and long to advance equity, diversity and inclusion and every NASH system can point to powerful evidence demonstrating progress on closing equity gaps. And yet, progress has been slow, with the pandemic foregrounding income and racial inequities in ways we cannot ignore.
As the team responsible for creating the Framework, we placed a great deal of attention and care to ensuring that this tool would assist systems in acknowledging and documenting system-level commitments, as somewhat distinguishable from–but not independent of–campus-level initiatives and activities. At the same time, the Framework invites dialogue and collaboration among system offices and institutions.
Dewayne: Collaborative dialogue with institutions is indeed critical. We hope that systems will use the Framework to move beyond pockets of excellence to full systemness. Recognizing that systems’ historical contexts are determinants for gaps and disparities, we were careful not to dictate what systems’ priorities should be nor did we want to explicitly tell systems what they should do to remedy disparities. Instead, we intentionally designed the Framework to be adaptable to fit the needs and context of each university system.
Rebecca: We believe the framework solves a problem we have in higher education, and this speaks to your points exactly: public higher education’s track record, while much improved, still has a long way to go to remove barriers, ensure an asset-based approach to serving students, and really become equity-centered. Systemness is exactly what is required; pockets of excellence are important but they can too easily keep responsibility marginalized or at bay. Systemness requires all hands on deck–deep, sustained, and scaled engagement to develop and implement solutions to pernicious problems and seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Dewayne: These days, it’s difficult to come up with novel ways to describe the historical, political and cultural moment we are in: singular, disruptive, unprecedented, filled with insurmountable challenges yet rife with opportunity. Amid the pandemic, unyielding political divisiveness, and renewed confrontations with racial injustice, the impacts on higher education can exacerbate existing inequities. Now is the time for systems to use the Framework to reaffirm their commitments and work with intentionality and action to remove systemic inequities and advance inclusive excellence.