Dr. LaVar Charleston Spearheads UW-Madison’s Diversity Efforts: High Impact Practices for Diversity
Dr. LaVar Charleston is bringing science to bear in his efforts to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging on UW-Madison’s campus.
Part 2 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
Dr. LaVar Charleston — the UW-Madison deputy vice-chancellor for diversity and inclusion, vice-provost and chief diversity officer and the Elzie Higginbotham director of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement — has been fighting stereotypes and their impact his entire life. And while he said that he would never do diversity work, here he is as UW-Madison’s chief diversity officer after having worked in the field at UW-Madison’s School of Education and at UW-Whitewater.
Charleston is a researcher and so he brings a researcher’s perspective to his work. He is data driven in making decisions about his division and the work it does. DDEEA is one division in a world of schools and colleges. And so Charleston knows that it takes collaboration with all of the university’s collaboration efforts to really make an impact of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) at the university.
“We have something that I am very proud of, our commitment to this work in terms of a distributive model of leadership so that now our 12 largest schools and colleges have senior level leaders who are diversity leaders in terms of associate deans or assistant deans and the like,” Charleston said. “And so now, the early models of just this symbol who is the chief diversity officer who did everything, is now diversity is everyone’s responsibility. It gets a little sticky because sometimes in some contexts if it is everyone’s responsibility, it’s no one’s responsibility, which is why you need strategic leaders and people who are skilled in these spaces. Sometimes, all you needed to be was a woman or LGBTQ+ or disabled or Black. People would just put you out there because it was a symbol, a kind of a token. But it isn’t as effective as a comprehensive distributive model of leadership where we are all — as I like to say — really going in the same direction, but also being in the same regatta going in the same direction. We have a population at UW-Madison of over 70,000 faculty, staff and students. There is no way one person or one office could do all of this by themselves.”
And while many units in the university are working on diversity efforts — there are currents that flow through all of the efforts — they must also allow for individual circumstances of the many schools and colleges on campus.
“I was among the first diversity leaders in the School of Education prepared me for this role because I understand the need of the academic enterprise and the needs of the deans in terms of how we can be a resource for their efforts,” Charleston said. “I did that and I was working across schools and colleges. We all worked together as associate deans. We had collective efforts and we would build off each other. ‘You’re doing a special project that can advise me in what I am trying to do. You hired a director of training, an innovation for equity, diversity and inclusion, and it’s a model for us. We can learn on each other in terms of best practices. Now I think the value of having spaces is because we have this overall vision of diversity as a source of strength at an institution that we all abide by in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging. But these positions in our schools and colleges enable us to really address the unique needs of the School of Medicine and Public Health, which might have different needs than the School of Education. While there is an umbrella that says these are our values and goals and we want to create communities of belonging for faculty, staff and students, how we get there and the interventions that we put in place might be different based on the niche area of study and research, etc. Now we have the opportunity to realize our goals no matter what our areas are collectively.”
And it is the diversity within diversity that is very important at the university. The tricky things is promoting the academic and personal growth of marginalized students — and staff — without creating silos built on stereotypes for the students, to recognize that each student is an individual and unique.
“For too long, diversity work unintended has been in the shape and/or form of black and white,” Charleston said. “We have to move toward looking at multiple intersecting identities. Religious identity, LGBTQ+ identity, level of ability in terms of creating an inclusive environment. It’s not that race and background aren’t important because they are and we can look at the numbers and we say, ‘Oh, we need to do some work in that space.’ But when we think about diversity, we’re also talking about majority students from rural Wisconsin, from urban places. How are we thinking about the multiple intersecting identities that make a student whole in addressing that? And how are we educating and preparing our majority students for global citizenry? Sometimes we look at it and say, ‘Okay, the division is for these Black kids or for these Asian kids or Native kids or Latinx kids. But how does the work of strategic diversity leadership prepare the entire University of Wisconsin-Madison and the majority of the UW-Madison are majority folks? What are we doing and how are we equipping them to be successful global citizens and culturally intelligent? Cultural competence is very important and part of our efforts as well.”
And yet DDEEA needs to give marginalized students spaces where they can get away the sometimes intense glare that they under during the course of their everyday student lives.
“We want the DDEEA to be a home away from home for folks,” Charleson said. “But our students are majoring in engineering, finance and all over the place. We still push students to engage in the community. You can be a part of the Mercile J. Scholars Program, but then you can go to an industrial plastics class and be the only person of color there. Part of it is equipping students with a space or a space that they can call home or where they can let their hair down and be themselves and we all need that, faculty, staff and students. We need a place where you don’t have to put on airs. Our programs are designed to build and create community so that if students need a reprieve, they can come here. But to be sure, our students are going out being leaders in a number of spaces all around this campus. We are very, very proud of that. We have Marshall Scholars and other national fellowship winners. Our students are often times leaders in other spaces on campus too.”
And yet Charleston know that the students must be involved in best-practice programming if they are truly going to be prepared for the global economy.
“The thing about High Impact Educational Practices is that they have been occurring for a while now,” Charleston said. “Research shows that students in internships and all of the HIPs as we call them need to be equity minded for them to be HIP. They have to have underpinnings that think about social and historical stratification, etc. But folks who participate in those are more likely to have higher GPAs, to decrease their time to degree attainment and to be more successful coming out of college in the job space. A lot of research has been done about that. Our goal for the division is that every student participates in at least two High Impact Educational Practices. And they could be in all of these different spaces like learning communities, first year programming, internships and even jobs can be HIP as long as it has that equity-minded piece to it. Study abroad, undergraduate research are also HIP. It’s part of our students’ holistic development and also it creates community, especially for folks who are historically marginalized or minoritized students on our campus as we know that the numbers of students of color on our campus are much smaller than the majority students here. How do they find community? How do they find a sense of belonging? It could be in this research lab that also propels them to their next level of education or field of study. It’s just very impactful to the students and the student experience here at UW-Madison.”
Dr. LaVar Charleston knows that it takes the right blend of facts and experience to create the best environment for all students and staff on the UW-Madison campus. Charleston will keep looking, adjusting and collaborating until UW-Madison is preparing all of its students to the height of their abilities to tackle the global economy of the future.
