Recently, President Schlissel highlighted the importance of Inclusion for the University of Michigan community: “We commit to pursuing deliberate efforts to ensure that our campus is a place where differences are welcomed, different perspectives are respectfully heard and where every individual feels a sense of belonging and inclusion. We know that by building a critical mass of diverse groups on campus and creating a vibrant climate of inclusiveness, we can more effectively leverage the resources of diversity to advance our collective capabilities.”
For anyone who has spent any time at all on the UM-Dearborn campus or listening to/reading the remarks of Chancellor Little, it is abundantly evident that UM-D assumed the lead on this front long before this recent pronouncement. Indeed, for the UM-D community the idea of “Inclusion” is both well understood and widely practiced. Walking across our campus, or spending time in the University Center, one cannot help but notice the wide array of cultures, races, religions, ethnicities, and gender orientations represented among our student body and faculty. Students regularly praise this aspect of their campus and value the exposure that they have to people who are different from themselves. This attribute of UM-D positions our students to be very successful in the increasingly globalized world into which they will be stepping after they complete their studies here at the university.
It has been a source of great pride to me to listen to our students and to watch them respond to the growing wave of hate, fear, and intolerance impacting large portions of American society in light or recent events abroad and at home; much of it arguing for exclusion rather than inclusion. As so many around them denounce those they do not understand or rail against those whose views differ from their own; as friends and family take to social media to spew hatred and suspicion; as the fearmongers pander to our basest instincts, UM-Dearborn students, faculty, and staff remain steadfast in their commitment to inclusion and to the power and import of difference, tolerance, and acceptance.
I hope that you agree that this is a noble goal and one worth committing to. I am proud to be part of such a community and look forward to lending my hand to President Schlissel as he and the rest of the University of Michigan community work to build inclusiveness across the three campuses.
