UF to welcome UCLA diversity and inclusion expert Mitchell Chang on March 23

Building on the awareness about diversity and inclusion generated at events held earlier this year — including the Provost’s Symposium on implicit bias in January and the Council on Diversity’s day of events featuring Professor Rumay Alexander of UNC-Chapel Hill in February — UF will host Professor Mitchell Chang of UCLA as a third speaker on the topics in March.

Chang is a professor of higher education and organizational change as well as courtesy faculty in Asian American Studies at UCLA whose research focuses on the educational efficacy of diversity-related initiatives on college campuses as well as application of those best practices toward advancing student learning and democratizing institutions. While on campus, he will share his views on how diversity and inclusion are linked to the mission of higher education as well as his thoughts on how we can maximize an environment for learning, diversity literacy and “inclusion as a journey.”

A session designed to allow the UF community to come together for questions and discussion with Chang will be held on Thursday, March 23, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. in Emerson Alumni Hall’s second floor classroom. In his discussion, Chang will draw lessons from his years of research and practice to address three central questions:

• Why should campuses invest their valuable time and resources in advancing campus diversity efforts?
• What keeps campuses from maximizing their efforts?
• What can campuses do to better advance their diversity efforts?

Chang has worked in the field of diversity in higher education as both a researcher and practitioner for more than two decades. His research has been cited widely, including in U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions. At UCLA, he has worked to diversify the faculty, departmentalize Asian American Studies, institutionalize an undergraduate diversity course requirement and implement a set of anti-discrimination practices and policies under the oversight of California’s attorney general.

Chang received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Fellowship in 2001 and was profiled as one of the nation’s top ten scholars under 40 in 2006 by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. He has served in elected positions for both the American Educational Research Association, which inducted him as a fellow in 2016, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education, which awarded him the Founder’s Service Award in 2014. He has also served on many national advisory panels, including for the U.S. Department of Education, the White House Domestic Policy Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health and the College Board.

To learn more about Professor Chang, please see http://everyone.ucla.edu/thought-leadership/mitchell-chang/. For more information about the event, please contact UF Human Resources at human-resources@ufl.edu.