Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the heart of our work at the School of International Service. Varied perspectives help generate better ideas to solve the complex challenges of today’s world. For the next generation of leaders, an inclusive approach to diversity will be a pathway to greater creativity, deeper self-learning, transnational cooperation, and enhanced capacity for collective impact. As a top-ten school of international affairs, we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to practice these values in everything we do. SIS embraces our responsibility to prepare students for these leadership roles in the service of the world.

Achieving our goals requires an unwavering commitment to challenge and dismantle racism and other structural obstacles that disproportionately impact historically underrepresented groups in higher education and the professional field of international affairs.

SIS commits to increasing diversity, fostering inclusion, and promoting equity, through the following actions:

• fostering a climate of understanding and support to enable an inclusive SIS community
• actively listening to, learning from, and reflecting on diverse contributions and experiences of our local and global communities
• recruiting students, staff, faculty, and administrators from historically underrepresented groups by finding talent in communities that have often been left out—including by creating strategic partnerships and pipelines
• enriching course curricula and scholarship to broaden representation of voices and viewpoints and move beyond overreliance on white, male, Western sources that have historically dominated the field
• increasing the use of inclusive pedagogical approaches in the classroom—which integrate historically underrepresented scholars, methods, and topics—to better serve all students
• advancing knowledge that values marginalized methods and topics to broaden the field and its audience while creating space to amplify works of historically underrepresented scholars
• preparing students to practice inclusion and empathy across difference in their careers and lives
• training all students, staff, faculty, and administrators to engage with a wide variety of people, ideas, cultures, and traditions
• using our social capital to expand professional and educational pathways for students from historically underrepresented groups
• expanding financial and other resources designated for making student access to academic, experiential, and professional development opportunities more equitable  
• offering programs and events to highlight both diverse topics that often have been excluded from discourse as well as structural inequities that inhibit the field of international affairs