Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Home

Inclusive Excellence is a commitment which reaffirms the university’s mission, vision and values and thus is situated at the heart of institutional functioning. It is a framework intended to establish a comprehensive and well-coordinated set of systemic actions that focus specifically on fostering greater diversity, equity, inclusion, and accountability at every level of university life, cultivating leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry. The central premise of Inclusive Excellence holds that Indiana State University will intentionally integrate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts into the foundations of the institutions, our academic priorities, leadership, quality improvement initiatives, decision-making, day-to-day operations, and organizational cultures—in order to maximize our success. Inclusive Excellence represents the next necessary step in our evolution as a committed institution to creating diverse learning environments that we know are vital to our students’ growth, learning, and achievement. A successful approach calls for shared responsibility from each division of Indiana State University to demonstrate diversity, equity, and inclusion as essential elements of the learning enterprise and essentialness to academic excellence.

Inclusive Excellence offers an approach for organizing our work in a deliberate, intentional and coordinated manner. This approach:

• Employs a dual focus in diversity efforts, concentrating on both increasing compositional diversity, and creating learning environments in which students of all socioeconomic backgrounds can thrive;
• Requires a more comprehensive, widespread level of engagement and commitment ensuring that every student fulfills their educational potential;
• Places the mission of diversity, equity and inclusion at the center of institutional life so that it becomes a core organizing principle, around which institutional decisions are made;
• Calls for a close attentiveness to the student experience itself, including the impact of race and ethnicity, and the influence of physical ability, sexual orientation, gender expression, socioeconomic background, and first-generation status on their learning experiences; and
• Demands that the ideals of diversity, inclusion and excellence be pursued as the interconnected and interdependent goals they are.