- Build an adaptive and holistic mindset among faculty, staff, and students.
- Value the exploration of important topics that may be challenging or uncomfortable.
- Facilitate a robust and inclusive diversity of thought and perspective on campus.
- Capture views that may be marginalized, missing, or unheard.
- Increase awareness of our human tendency toward bias and misconception.
- Nurture and enrich an inclusive and equitable campus community.
The Office of Holistic Excellence was developed to promote scholarly, creative, and practical solutions to persistent challenges, particularly those related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Its goal is to support and encourage diversity of knowledge and thought, both of which are linked with open-mindedness. It also seeks to build empathy, curiosity, and mental fortitude as these allow us to engage with one another more positively and effectively across campus and beyond. The Office does not replace or eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Instead, it is designed to address DEI challenges more broadly and comprehensively. In addition, it focuses on transformative teaching and learning in an environment of civil discourse, reasoned argument, and truth seeking.
A recent LearningWell magazine article, What’s Your Story, helps to explain the vision for this office and how it aligns with DEI initiatives.
Mission Statement
OHE Co-Directors
Rima Berry-Hung
Director of Human Resources
Shareia Carter
Director, Center for Social Justice and Inclusion
Marie Waung
CASL Associate Dean
Focus Areas
Holistic Excellence Initiatives
- Digital Storytelling Hub: A Mosaic of Voices.
- Annual Campus Themes with Workshops, Activities, and Events.
- Goals: an inclusive campus community; transformative teaching/learning; support of research linked with holistic excellence and DEI.
Enhancing the Mission
- Consider and assess existing activities on campus and their relationship with the OHE.
Internal and External Partnerships
- Develop a process and criteria for vetting partnership requests; develop and share a list of partners and specifics of what the partnership entails. Include offices such as HR, ECRT, and M-Healthy.
Academic Year Objectives
Objective
- Build Empathy as the foundation for campus inclusion.
- Holistic Excellence, DEI, and Research Support.
Process or Mechanism
- Digital Storytelling: A Mosaic of Voices; generating stories; engaging with these stories on campus; developing external partnerships/outlets; Year 1 Theme-Empathy.
- Work with Office of Research; engage with faculty with research interests that align with OHE mission and/or with storytelling; support DEI in research.
Assessing Impact
- Track campus engagement with the digital storytelling hub, and storytelling research and events focused on inclusion.
- Add empathy and support items to existing campus climate and satisfaction surveys (e.g., to what extent have you felt valued as a member of this campus?).
- Track holistic excellence and DEI research support.
KPI
- Increase number of campus members engaged in empathy and inclusion activities.
- Increase number of grants written with OHE/DEI components.
Objective
- Promote Diversity of Thought- build mental fortitude, resilience, curiosity; strengthen civil discourse, reasoned argument, and truth seeking.
- Student Transformational Learning- learning broadly and deeply; beyond a single discipline or major.
Process or Mechanism
- Themes (e.g., Year 1: Empathy, Year 2: Mental Fortitude; Year 3: Civil Discourse); workshops, speakers, and activities linked with yearly theme.
- Classroom assignments and other activities linked with holistic excellence; work with key faculty to integrate yearly theme into student learning.
Assessing Impact
- Track engagement in diversity of thought activities.
- Add diversity of thought items to campus climate and satisfaction surveys (e.g. to what extent does our campus climate facilitate open engagement in a variety of topics?).
- Track the extent to which courses contain holistic learning opportunities.
KPI
- Increase number of campus members attending/engaging with diversity of thought activities.
- Increase number of courses with content and activities pertaining to holistic excellence.