Leading a Diversity Culture Shift in Higher Education ─ Comprehensive Strategies for Organizational Leadership

Leading a Diversity Culture Shift in Higher Education offers a practical and timely guide for launching, implementing, and institutionalizing diversity organizational learning. The authors draw from extensive interviews with chief diversity officers and college and university leaders to reveal the prevailing models and best practices for strengthening diversity practices within the higher education community today. They complement this original research with an analysis of key contextual factors that shape the organizational learning process including administrative leadership, institutional mission and goals, historical legacy, geographic location, and campus structures and politics.

Given the substantive challenge of engendering a cultural shift for diversity in a university setting, this book will serve as a concrete primer for institutions seeking to develop a systematic and progressive approach to diversity organizational learning. Readers will be able to engage with provocative case studies that grapple with the current pressures emanating from diversity training and learn effective strategies for creating more inclusive environments.

This book is a perfect resource for institutional leaders, administrators, faculty members, and key campus constituencies who are seeking transformational change, institutional success, and stability in a rapidly diversifying national and global environment.

Edna Chun and Alvin Evans are award-winning authors and human resource diversity leaders with extensive experience in complex, multi-campus systems of higher-education. Two of their books, Are the Walls Really Down? Behavioral and Organizational Barriers to Faculty and Staff Diversity (2007) and Bridging the Diversity Divide: Globalization and Reciprocal Empowerment in Higher Education (2009) were the recipients of the prestigious Kathryn G. Hanson Publication Award by the national College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. They are also the authors of the first book appearing in Routledge’s Critical Viewpoints book series, Diverse Administrators in Peril (2012). Their co-authored book, The New Talent Acquisition Frontier: Integrating HR and Diversity Strategy in the Private and Public Sectors and Higher Education (Stylus, 2014), received a silver medal in the 2014 Axiom Business Book Awards and is the first book to provide a concrete road map to the integration of HR and diversity strategy.

Chun and Evans are also regular contributors to a number of leading journals on talent management, HR, and diversity strategies. The co-authors are frequent presenters at national conferences and symposia including the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, the Academic Chairpersons Conference, the Society for Human Resource Management, and the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity. Edna Chun is Chief Leading Officer and Alvin Evans serves as Higher