Guest Speaker: Getting from Diversity & Inclusion to Equity & Justice in Higher Education (Dr. Nimisha Barton)

For some time now, commentators have remarked upon the various crises unfolding in higher education. But the events of 2020 exposed new cracks in the foundation. Not only did the pandemic test university leadership unlike ever before, but the gathering force of the #BlackLivesMatter movement reached a crescendo in summer 2020. The murder of George Floyd prompted students, staff, and faculty to join together in protest against the pervasive and corrosive force of anti-Blackness within historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs). In so doing, they laid bare the unfinished business of the Civil Rights era on college campuses and the limits of DEI reform efforts to date.

In this talk, Dr. Barton argues that the 1990s-era diversity framework has taken higher education as far as it can. In order to address legacies of exclusion embedded within HWCUs, we must instead embrace a social justice framework that renders visible structural oppression and the ongoing legacies of racist exclusion. Dr. Barton offers attendees a sense of the fraught history of higher education and identifies the common obstacles we share. Drawing on abolitionist ideology, Barton suggests new tools and frameworks that can help higher ed leaders and faculty chart a new path forward through the raging culture wars.

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