Chancellor’s Message
“Creating Community” is an appropriate theme to develop as UW-Madison continues its goal of expanding diversity in campus life. Our success does not hinge on any one office or division, nor is it strictly a question of enrollment or hiring practices.
We all have a role to play, and we all have a stake in its outcome.
“Creating Community” will reinforce the need for broad campus input on how this institution can foster and promote diversity. The campus-wide forums will provide status reports on Plan 2008, highlight some of our more successful programs and examine areas where we are falling short. But it’s critically important that the interaction runs both ways, and that diversity leaders hear about the challenges and successes on the front lines of education.
In the end, our ability to institute change will come from the classroom and from one-on-one interactions among faculty, staff and students.
During the Fall 2005 welcome for first-year students, I challenged the group to seek out someone different from them, someone whose background or ethnicity or identity is uniquely different from their own. I recommended it as a single, small step in understanding the power of diversity to shape our knowledge of the world. It’s also a step I hope students are ready to repeat many times over as they prepare to live in a multicultural society.
Through Creating Community, we will continue to define out diversity goals on both an institutional—and a personal—level.
Stay tuned to this site in the coming months. It will be continually updated with profiles and features that tell UW-Madison’s story of diversity and some of the unique individuals who are making a difference.
I hope you will be part of that story as well.
Sincerely,
John D. Wiley, Chancellor