Loyola Marymount University is a founding member of NADOHE. Its inaugural Senior Diversity Officer, Abbie Robinson-Armstrong, was a founding board member and served on the board for eight years. When Robinson-Armstrong joined LMU in 2001, the school created the position of Assistant to the President for Intercultural Affairs.
In 2003, the school received a James Irvine Foundation grant that established the Academic Community of Excellence — a graduate and professional school pipeline program for underrepresented students — Intercultural Dialogues Series, and Faculty Development and Course Transformation Initiative, designed to integrate diversity and inclusive teaching into the university's curriculum. The school was also awarded a grant by the AAC&U in 2021 and became a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation campus.
The school is a recipient of NADOHE’s Institutional Excellence Award, Four-Year Institution for 2023. Responses below are provided by Emelyn A. dela Peña, Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at LMU.
Why is LMU an institutional member of NADOHE?
The field of diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism, and justice work is ever-evolving. It’s important to keep up with the current scholarship and best practices in this work so we can best serve our campus communities. We also know that having a collective voice makes us stronger as an association. This work is also sometimes really hard on both an institutional level and a personal level for those of us who “do” diversity work. It’s important to have a base of support and affirmation for each other and our campuses.
What does it mean to have “Studies in American Diversity” in the school’s core curriculum?
In 2022, the faculty voted to revise the core curriculum, including the defining characteristics of “Studies in American Diversity.” In the spring of 2023, funds were provided for faculty to lead workshops on revising and developing the curriculum to meet these new standards.
Along with addressing the complexity of race and racialization in the U.S. context and highlighting the voices of people and communities of color, the standards mean that the classes must prepare students for upper-level work while taking questions of race and marginalization as their central theme.
Courses in the area must also place scholarly practices of African American studies, Asian American studies, Latino/a studies, Native American studies and gender studies in the foreground. Additionally, classes integrate various diversity markers — such as gender, class, immigration status and more — into at least one substantive assignment.
What are some future diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives planned for the school?
We’ve recently made some changes to our Ombuds services that we’re really excited to implement, improve, and share with other campuses. In alignment with our Truth, Racial, Healing, and Transformation work, we’re creating an Ombuds service that is grounded in a restorative framework designed to engage conflicts in ways that can be potentially generative. We hope that framing our Ombuds service in this way will make it less transactional and allow us to help the campus community learn about better conflict engagement.
We’ve also since launched a Silicon Beach DEI Consortium to promote increased diversity, equity, inclusion, and opportunities, for LMU stakeholders and community partners. Our goal is to provide each other with insights, strategies, tools, and resources regarding DEI opportunities, best practices, and challenges within our organizations and the communities we serve. Membership is open to diversity, equity, and inclusion officers of community partners within the greater Los Angeles area and beyond, and anyone with an affiliation to LMU who is interested in advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals.