Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as an IT Issue

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to EDUCAUSE Exchange where we focus on a single question from the higher ed IT community and hear advice, anecdotes, best practices, and more. Our institutions are best served by a community that more closely reflects the demographic diversity of the students we serve. Research demonstrates that diverse communities are more resilient, more creative and more effective. So, the question for this episode is, in what ways is diversity, equity and inclusion an IT issue?

Leo Howell: So IT is about people. I mean, all the technology is cool and it's fine but at the end of the day, IT is about providing services to people.

Gerry Bayne: That's Leo Howell, chief information security officer at the University of Oregon. He says that when providing technology services to the campus, you must understand and empathize with all the different types of users that you're supporting and have a team that reflects those populations.

Leo Howell: On a university campus, for example, very diverse. There are people from many different international backgrounds. There are young people, older people, there are diversity across race and sex and everything you can imagine. And I'm not just talking about diversity in terms of race and sex and gender. I'm talking about diversity in terms of thought, the way people think, their cultural background, where they're coming from, because I think when they bring that all together, it's going to be a better environment than we have today.

So in my mind, if IT is going to be successful, you have to have people on your team that represents the community that you're serving. To me, the best team you can have in IT is a team that's going to look somewhat like the community that you're trying to serve. Because then when you get into those rooms, you're hardly coming up with ideas on what's going to work for different population, you can have some representation and there's a better chance you're going to deliver successful services.

Gerry Bayne: Vernon Franklin is diversity and inclusion program manager have the University of Pittsburgh. He says the technology and mindset are out of sync. And that the origins of how we built our institutions needs to be examined.

Vernon Franklin: DEI is an issue in IT and throughout the university because people's mindsets are not changing as rapidly as technology is evolving. And I can remember a book that I read years ago about change in organizations. And they talked about the percentage of people that change. And it was 80% of the people did not seek change. 20% of the population that they interviewed always sought change. So as a result of that, I feel that people's mindsets, aren't changing.

And there was also a recent study done by Gartner Research. And they were talking about self-awareness. It was a global study where they had mentioned that 95% of people felt that they were self-aware. And after the study, it proved that there was only 10 to 15% of people that are self-aware. So because of these two issues, I feel that there's a mind issue in IT people need to change. Also, the institutions were built from individuals with a bias mindset, and I think we're still living through a lot of what was established back when the institutions were developed.

Gerry Bayne: Franklin says seeing the way forward is an adaptive challenge for leadership that must explore new knowledge and new professional development opportunities.

Vernon Franklin: Once you receive that, you have to understand your culture and knowing where you want to go with your culture. And then you must have leadership development. It has to start there.

Gerry Bayne: According to Colleen Carmean, founder of the Ethical Analytics Group at the University of Washington Tacoma, analytics can help in this endeavor.

Colleen Carmean: To create a culture of analytics that says, we have evidence that we are failing certain populations, we need to do the work of finding out why, and we need to commit to change. I think we're all capable of doing that. We can put together an understanding of best practices of a commitment to having goals and principles of your campus that defines who's allowed to see the data and what is it and what we'll do with it. I think if we came together as a community, all that would be so much easier than doing it alone.

Gerry Bayne: Catherine Zabriskie, senior academic technology officer at Brown University looks at software as an important part of equity.

Catherine Z.: Diversity, equity, and inclusion is an issue for all of us, but I think it's particularly important in the IT area. And I think this because IT has both the role to be the cause of making people excluded as well as potentially the source for including people.

Gerry Bayne: Resources like access to captioning and text functions are pieces of the puzzle that can be easy to overlook when thinking about the campus as a whole.

Catherine Z.: If we do not consider accessibility when we select software packages, or when we develop our business practices, we are isolating whole populations of our communities. Simply we must caption our video and we must make sure that the software packages that we choose are readable by screen readers. It's just that simple.

Recently, a faculty member who is deaf pointed out to me that he cannot reach out for help when he's in the classroom. Our business model is all around making a phone call. If he needs help setting up his projector or fixing a problem, he can't reach out to help. So we came up with a simple solution. We now include the ability to text from the classroom, that easy, and now he can reach out for help. And his colleagues can also take advantage of that function.

Gerry Bayne: More general resources are another important factor. Access to WiFi, a functioning computer, and the tools needed to learn are not always available to everyone.

Tonya Bennett: I feel like the digital divide has always been a thing, right?

Gerry Bayne: Tonya Bennett is director for educational technology at Penn Vet at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tonya Bennett: And so we saw that a lot now with COVID. When students have to go home and they have like not ideal WiFi situations a lot of people are using because of their [inaudible 00:06:44] status, a lot of people are using the same WiFi and it slows down tremendously, or there's just like a lot of different levels. So what if they have outdated equipment at home and they're not able to afford the computers they work on in the school environment or that the library provides, and those kinds of things. So there's definitely an IT layer and a social justice layer to all of this.

You tell them to pay for something like, "Oh, now you all need to buy these tablets that have drawing capabilities," like, how do you tell someone that they need to do that in order to pass the class that would have normally been given in person and now they can't? And now you're passing on that burden in that cost to them. There are a whole lot of social issues with technology.

John O'Brien: DEI is an IT issue and moreover, DEI is a higher education issue and opportunity.

Gerry Bayne: John O'Brien is president and CEO of EDUCAUSE.

John O'Brien: I was the son of two factory workers, a first-generation college student. Neither of my parents went to college. For me, the act of having the opportunity to go to college was literally life-changing. The access to education created an entirely new pathway for me. And that's always been what higher education means. That's why at the end of the 19th century, we created the Morrill Act, which opened up access to the children of farmers, the children of new Americans, that's what education has always been, about hope and opportunity. And the reality across the world is that higher education, rather than leading the way now, when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, in some ways we're lagging behind.

I recently wrote a piece in EDUCAUSE Review with ACE President, Ted Mitchell, and in there, we talked about the current situation. If you look at CIOs, and if you just focus for one element of diversity, equity and inclusion, and that is women and women as CIOs, in our 2018 workforce study, the number of women CIOs actually declined. It went from 27% to 23%. So, in that one element of diversity, equity and inclusion in the specific world of higher ed IT, we're actually going in the wrong direction. And so this requires significant attention and a sense of urgency. And then most recently with these tremendous racial outbursts of impatience and an unwillingness to tolerate these kinds of inequities, we turn our attention to things like the number of African-American CIOs and we find only 3% of our CIOs are black, and how can higher education lead the way on diversity, equity and inclusion when we don't reflect the diversity of the populations we serve?

Gerry Bayne: For more information on this topic, visit the EDUCAUSE DEI resource Page at educause.edu/deiresources. It's where you'll find a wealth of information, including video, articles, tips, guides, and communities to help you elevate diversity and inclusion as a priority personally, or for your organization. That's educause.edu/deiresources.

I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE, thanks for listening.