Respect, diversity, inclusion and caring

We want you to not just feel welcome at UAF — we want you to feel you belong here.

That's why UAF embraces a culture of respect, diversity, inclusion and caring. It's one UAF's six strategic goals.

The Office of Rights, Compliance and Accountability, the Nanook Diversity and Acation Center, and the Chief Diversity Faculty Fellow, Retchenda George Bettisworth, lead UAF's inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility efforts. We seek inclusive excellence and institutional transformation. We can do this by creating cohesion in our strategic actions and connections. Our goal is a safe and equitable environment that engages and ignites all with common courtesy, compassion, dignity and respect.

We encourage you to get involved — provide feedback, connect and engage!

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What is "inclusive excellence"?

"Inclusive Excellence re-envisions both quality and diversity. It reflects a striving for excellence in higher education that has been made more inclusive by decades of work to infuse diversity into recruiting, admissions, and hiring; into the curriculum and co-curriculum; and into administrative structures and practices. It also embraces newer forms of excellence, and expanded ways to measure excellence, that take into account research on learning and brain functioning, the assessment movement, and more nuanced accountability structures. In the same way, diversity and inclusion efforts move beyond numbers of students or numbers of programs as end goals. Instead, they are multilayered processes through which we achieve excellence in learning; research and teaching; student development; institutional functioning; local and global community engagement; workforce development; and more."

—"Towards a Model of Inclusive Excellence & Change in Post-Secondary Institutions," Damon Williams, University of Connecticut, and Joseph Berger and Shederick McClendon, University of Massachusetts

 

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