Diversity & Inclusion

Our Approach

Guiding Principles

• Engage. The challenges we face require ideas, energy, and buy-in from as many members of the College community as possible. We seek to engage everyone at the level of commitment they can offer.
• Divide and coordinate. By partitioning responsibility among the four groups and empowering each to define the challenges and propose solutions, we establish accountability and allow each group to focus on a more manageable task. Coordinating among the four groups, with everyday College operations and with the Vice Provost for Diversity, UD ADVANCE, and others at the university level, we ensure the groups’ efforts are aligned and efficient.
• Be strategic. Our approach is data and research driven, systematic and analytical, setting goals, targeting interventions, and assessing progress to be as effective and efficient as possible.
• Integrate. Rather than operating as a separate stream of activities, diversity and inclusion must be an integral part of normal College operations – recruiting, advising, and teaching students; recruiting and supporting faculty and staff. This is the only way to get to the source, rather than symptom, of some issues, and to ensure that changes are institutionalized and sustainable.
• Communicate. We seek transparency and openness for diversity and inclusion efforts so that we can uncover and include as many good ideas as possible, engage as many community members as possible, and ultimately take advantage of momentum from early successes to facilitate later ones.

Strategic Plan

• Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan

Research

• Engineering Diversity: Using the Engineering Design Process to Develop and Implement a Strategic Plan of Action for Undergraduate Diversity at the Institution Level

Data

To assess progress towards our goals, evaluate interventions, and identify both successes and areas requiring more attention, we are regularly monitoring (1) the demographic makeup of the faculty, students, and staff in the College of Engineering and (2) the climate within the College.

Demographic Data

Demographic data are updated each fall. They include both data on absolute numbers of faculty, students, and staff, as well as comparisons to our peer institutions on these metrics.

• Fall 2018 report and raw data 
• Fall 2017 report

Additional demographic data is available for the University of Delaware as a whole through the Institutional Research Office: UD Data on Diversity.

Focus group studies

In collaboration with the UD Center for Research in Education and Social Policy (CRESP), we conducted focus group studies of College of Engineering undergraduates (2017), graduate students (2018), and staff (2018). The aims of the focus group studies were to:

• Examine perceptions of diversity and inclusion among the students and staff in the College
• Identify strengths, areas in need of improvement, and differences in perceptions between majority and underrepresented groups
• Provide the foundation for development of climate survey instruments to be deployed periodically in the future to track progress

Summaries of the studies are available here:

• Undergraduate focus group study
• Graduate student focus group study
• Staff focus group study

Climate surveys

Surveys developed based on the focus group results will be deployed for undergraduate students, graduate students, and staff every two years to assess the climate in the College. Perceptions of the faculty will be captured using the UD ADVANCE climate survey.

• Undergraduate student survey

  Coming soon.

• Graduate student survey

  Coming soon.

• Staff survey

  Coming soon.

• Faculty climate survey

  See UD ADVANCE for the periodically conducted University faculty climate survey.

Recent Highlights