Being truly healthy means far more than simply being free from ailments and afflictions. When we assess health, we must also take into account the many other factors that affect well-being — poverty, discrimination, climate change and violence, to name just a few. These factors, and many others, combine and conspire to prevent so many of our neighbors and our fellow humans from being able to live healthy and productive lives. And these and other factors are, in one way or another, within the University of Washington’s power to help address on behalf of our communities and the world’s people, and in service to our public mission.
As one of the world’s leading universities in research and innovation, we have an opportunity — indeed, a responsibility — to maximize our strengths University-wide to help people live longer, healthier, happier and more productive lives. It is an opportunity made possible by your passion and drive, by decades of progress led by UW faculty with many collaborators and partners here in the Puget Sound and worldwide, and by our shared desire to improve the world around us.
This spring, Interim Provost Baldasty and I, working with the Faculty Senate and the University’s planning processes, will convene a Population Health Leadership Council. We will charge this group with assessing our strengths and opportunities, certainly in the health sciences, but even more broadly across the diverse range of fields that influence wellness and health. These include education, law, the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as the many areas across the University where our approach to inclusive innovation improves people’s lives. Working with extraordinary partners and organizations here in the Puget Sound and around the world, we will initiate a process next fall to imagine and develop a 25-year vision for improving population health. Faculty, students and staff from all disciplines and campuses will be invited to be a part of this effort.
This isn’t a call to build something new, but rather a pledge to strengthen and build greater collaborations and connections, and create opportunities among our already extraordinary and highly impactful efforts.
We have never had the capacity to know more, learn more or share more than we do today. Let’s use that strength to its greatest possible benefit — and in the process develop in UW students the skills and leadership abilities needed to make a tremendous difference in the world.
Thank you for your many contributions to the health and well-being of people here and around the globe. Working together, we truly can create a world of good.
The health of an individual or a community involves more than just the absence of disease. Issues from poverty and equity, to health care access, to climate change and governance all combine to affect the health and well-being of populations around the world. The University of Washington and our partners in the Puget Sound region have a remarkable opportunity to develop solutions for these and other challenges.
On May 3, President Ana Mari Cauce invited the University community and our partners to join in the development of a 25-year vision to advance the health and well-being of people around the world by leveraging capabilities and opportunities at the UW and in our region.
Transcript: A shared vision for improving health and well-being around the world
Speaker: President Ana Mari Cauce
Location: Orin Smith Auditorium, UW Medicine South Lake Union Campus
Date: May 3, 2016
Good afternoon, I’m so pleased to see all of you on this beautiful day. You work hard to make this world a better place – I’m grateful for what you do and for your being here today.
I want to start by thanking our deans and UW leadership, our government officials, and our global health partners. We all have busy lives, and this is an especially busy time, so I really appreciate your being here, because this is really about our community.
Today, I want to ask you to look ahead – to the future.
Thanks to your work, and that of those who came before you and will come after, we have an unprecedented opportunity to help people live longer, healthier, more productive lives – here and around the world. I’d like you to join me today in imagining how the University of Washington, together with the incredible organizations and people in this region, can contribute in even greater ways to the health and well-being of our world. How we can take the next big step to improve people’s lives by deepening our commitment to what I will refer to here as population health.
But first, I want to tell you about a community.
It’s a community like many others, full of people with dreams for themselves and hopes for their children. People facing all the challenges of our interconnected world, but with few of the opportunities most of us in this room enjoy.
The people of this community go off to work each day – when they can find work – not always sure of how much they’ll earn, or whether they’ll earn enough to support their families. Many women go back to work just days after giving birth, even those who are raising children alone – having lost partners to violence or drugs, disease or incarceration – or perhaps because they fled violence from a war or a natural disasters impelled by climate change.
Many in this community face discrimination because of their race or ethnicity. It presents itself in big and small ways, from whether they can find a decent place to live, to whether the local security services stop and question them on the street.
Parents in this community send their children off to school each day, hoping more opportunities will be possible through education. But a quarter of them leave without having breakfast. And when they do have food, it’s often lacking in the nutrients needed to power their growing bodies and minds. In this community, good food is expensive and scarce.
These children go to underfunded, and in some cases, declining schools. Dedicated teachers do their best with what resources they have. They do everything they can, as do their colleagues who work in nearby clinics – working with those who come to them with conditions that were preventable, and diseases that were treatable – if they had been covered by insurance, or if the treatment were affordable, or if they were able to afford missing work to get care.
The daily trials of the people of this community are largely invisible to the world, except for those times when a correspondent parachutes in to report on a tragedy – a singular event deemed more newsworthy than the day-to-day struggles of an entire community.
Yet the people of this community live in, or on the outskirts of, one of the world’s great cities. A few miles away, gleaming skyscrapers multiply on the horizon. This city is a boom town, like others that had the good fortune to be located on an avenue of world trade, at the intersection of a new economy. In this city, it seems as if wealth and happiness are there for the taking. But for the residents of this community, that boom town may as well be a world away.
I could be describing any host of urban areas around the world, where only miles away from the glittering towers are people barely scraping by, out of public view.
But, this community is right here, in King County. Where a distance of a few miles can mean a difference in life expectancy of more than a decade. Where two-thirds of black and Latino students go to schools where a majority of the students are from low-income families.
Ours is a region of opportunity, yes. But that opportunity is too often determined not by how hard you work, but by the circumstances of your birth.
We talk a lot about disruption, but less about the disrupted.
That is why our calling as a University so important. Like so many Pacific Northwest organizations, we are products of this beautiful land of the Coast Salish peoples, of glaciers and volcanoes, rainforests with giant trees whose roots spread out for hundreds of feet. We too are firmly planted on this land, in this community, but our reach is global and our aspiration is nothing less than to change the world. We are citizens of our state and citizens of the world. We are a state university and a global university. And we have a duty to act on behalf of the local and global good, because they are intertwined and inseparable.
Humanity’s collective yearning for a better life – not just today, as we grapple with refugees seeking safety from war – but over the course of history, shows us that oceans can’t divide us and that walls offer no defense against diseases that travel the globe. We have the capacity, together, to contribute to a healthy and productive life for all of us. And whether studying or working in business or social work, international relations or medicine, our students have an opportunity to have a tremendous impact on the world, because this is the right time and because of our partnership with you, this is also the right place.
It’s important to begin with defining what we mean by health. Health is more than the absence of disease, though that’s important and our University plays a crucial role discovering new treatments and cures for a wide range of diseases and conditions, from emerging diseases like Zika to age-old maladies like heart disease and cancer. Couple that with our work and interventions in developing countries throughout the world, and the more than $275 million in charity care we provide here at home – and we have a clear role in helping people live longer, happier lives – no question.
Yet, there are many conditions intertwined with physical and mental health and well-being: from nutrition and education, to the quality of the air we breathe, to social and environmental equity. And, there are the many ways one can fall – or be pushed – into poverty.
There are also many ways we can help people out of it – from providing access to better education and economic opportunities, to building more effective societal infrastructures and governance. By identifying and addressing the causes and impacts of a broad swath of health indicators for populations of people – from neighborhoods to countries – we have an opportunity to truly impact health and well-being in profound ways, here and worldwide.
We have an opportunity to improve the population health of the world.
The great news is, the UW and many of you, our regional partners throughout the Puget Sound, have built the capacity and resources to truly utilize knowledge in ways more powerful than we could have ever imagined. What I am calling for today is not for us to build something new, from scratch, but rather a strengthening of our combined efforts – a commitment to create a shared vision, to be implemented in shared partnerships, over the next quarter century – in service to the people we serve locally and globally. This can and should be a defining priority for our University, the Puget Sound region, and our state.
I come to this after having spent the last year gaining a unique view of our University. Despite having been at the UW for 30 years, and thinking I knew every corner of this place, as president I now have an even broader view – one that is enabling me to see the many opportunities that exist to connect, to weave together, seemingly disparate fields of study and research.
Serving as president means you get invited to more places than you do as provost or as a member of the faculty. I’ve had the incredible opportunity to learn about the work of the Road Map Project in South King County, to meet with tribal leaders at Lummi Nation, and to see – or rather breathe – first-hand the effects of pollution in China. These experiences, and my conversations with many of you and many of our global neighbors, have given me a deeper understanding of the role the UW already plays – and the additional role it can play – in contributing to the health and well-being of our world.
We are the leading public university in the country for sponsored research. We have one of the largest, most comprehensive biomedical research programs in the world. Given our size and breadth – three campuses, over 50,000 students and 5,000 faculty – we have impact on a massive scale, and our impact is focused on the public good. Our commitment to innovation in every corner of the University means that we are not only willing, but eager, to pursue new lines of inquiry. We’re undaunted by the risk of failure, because that’s how we hone in on success, and we know the tremendous good we will do when we succeed.
Our location in the Puget Sound region amplifies our impact on population health. We link arms with more than 130 organizations working on population and global health. From the Gates Foundation and PATH and the Washington Global Health Alliance, to organizations focusing on individual nations or specific maladies, there are few places on Earth with more opportunities for collaboration and collective impact than right here. We will need their – your – guidance and commitment as we shape this vision.
What’s more, our region’s role as a global hub for computing and information technology – we really do own the cloud – means we have at our disposal more talent and computing power than has ever before been assembled. Through big data research, patterns that once would have been invisible can now be studied, enabling us to identify the root cause of problems and measure the success of health interventions and ultimately preventive measures. We have the ability to not only diagnose individuals, but entire cities and even nations through the application of the technology at our fingertips. We know what ails us, our communities and our planet – and we can put that into better practices to do something about it.
As a university, we have the ability and responsibility to contribute to the public discourse about the best ways to solve the health challenges of our time. As scholars we test hypotheses, we engage in deep and rigorous analysis. We follow the evidence wherever it leads, and oftentimes that is someplace unexpected – even controversial. At a time when policy debates too often seem fact-free, we present our work to policymakers and the public so they can make informed decisions. This role isn’t always easy – challenging conventional wisdom and entrenched interests rarely is – but it is vital if we are to create inclusive, democratic societies.
People throughout our community and our world see the benefits of our collaborative, interdisciplinary, data-driven approach. It is an approach that, from the start, has been in partnership with many of you.
I’d like to share just a few of many, many, many powerful examples:
The UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, launched nine years ago with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is presenting leaders and policymakers with what amounts to a diagnosis for their nations. And those leaders are responding enthusiastically. Data from IHME led the Ministry of Health in Rwanda to create a program to deliver modern, cleaner burning cook stoves to 1 million homes.
In the world’s most populous nations, including China and India, policymakers are now using UW data to guide their decisions related to reducing air pollution. Perhaps most significantly, the National Institutes of Health is now using IHME data as one of its criteria for deciding where to fund research – that’s $30 billion in annual research funding distributed to improve the health of the world, and their decision about where it goes is informed by UW data. How cool is that?
UW Medicine has 26,000 employees and 5,000 students and trainees here and throughout the world focused on a single mission – to improve the health of populations. In line with our public mission, this work is done in concert with local government; we run the county’s hospital, and are among the first to become an accountable care provider to a local company.
Together with faculty across the health sciences and our collaborators throughout the extended region, we’re creating the next generation of health professionals, treating thousands of patients, leading in social work and public health interventions. I’m particularly pleased with our expanding collaborations to accelerate the pace of curing and preventing cancer within the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. As well as with our new partner in medical education, Gonzaga University in Spokane, as we focus on the needs of communities is Eastern Washington.
The Department of Global Health is a crucial collaborator and leader in this worldwide mission, with active projects in 138 countries. One of those projects uses modern technology – text messaging – to address an age-old concern of new and expectant mothers: how can I best care for my baby? Led by Dr. Jennifer Unger, also in OB-GYN, the project shows that giving new mothers in Kenya the ability to ask questions of health professionals through two-way text messaging decreases infant mortality. Texting saving lives – remarkable.
In another groundbreaking effort, researchers from the School of Public Health and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center led the largest study of its kind into disparities in breast cancer treatment and diagnosis. What they found confirms the shameful existence of inequality in detection and treatment, with women of color up to four times more likely to be diagnosed with cancer in its late stages, and at much higher risk of not receiving the recommended treatment.
Meanwhile, the UW Jackson School’s Center for Human Rights is drawing attention to the direct connections between the management of our natural resources and the welfare of communities who depend on those resources. The “resource curse” is a well-known phenomenon; because of the hunt for natural resources that drives our world economy, millions of people around the world are exploited and their health and well-being threatened. Their lands are deforested, or simply taken, their water polluted, their communities forever altered – at least until we can develop scalable, sustainable alternatives.
The Puget Sound Institute, part of UW Tacoma’s Center for Urban Waters, is developing indicators, to help us better understand the relationship between habitat restoration and well-being. And knowing that our urban centers are our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity, Urban@UW brings together faculty from all three UW campuses to build inclusive innovation collaborations focused on improving health in urban areas around the globe.
Similarly, the West Coast Poverty Center is taking a cross-disciplinary approach, uniting anti-poverty research, practice and policy by forging connections between scholars, policymakers and practitioners. For example, Professor Vicky Lawson – director of the Honors Program and the Relational Poverty Network – and her students are studying poverty as produced and addressed by economic, political and cultural relationships between social groups. Many different factors beyond economics conspire to force families into poverty and to keep them there – from the health care system, to climate impacts, to the criminal justice system, to discrimination in housing. A holistic approach is not only beneficial, but vital, as we strive toward social justice.
Improving well-being also means ensuring our individual actions and those of our institutions continue to combat the effects of racism and inequity. Through the Race and Equity initiative, the UW is taking up this challenge, and I’m inspired by the work happening across our campuses, particularly among our students.
Speaking of our students, you might want to check out “Skies Over Seattle” – three student-generated performances that have evolved out of a year of collaboration and conversation with three U-District community groups. The arts and humanities have a way of breaking down barriers in ways that other interactions cannot. You can learn from our students’ experiences – and support them on stage – during the world premiere next month. Be there or be square.
Our students are the leaders, innovators, change-makers who will shape the health of the world. And they aren’t waiting until graduation to make a difference.
Dentistry students regularly serve patients in rural and underserved communities, our Global Medicines Program pharmacy students take part in medical brigades, and students in law and political science work on human rights and labor issues in Central and South America. We are number one, in the world, in Peace Corps volunteers! And the University of Puget Sound and our new partner, Gonzaga University, share the number one spot for small schools in producing volunteers. That tells you something about our region’s culture.
In every one of our schools and colleges, students are working alongside faculty, and advocates, and community leaders to improve health and well-being – always learning, sometimes teaching, and invariably inspiring us with their drive and their passion. Our work is better because of the questions they raise and the barriers they’ve inspired us to break, starting with the barriers between disciplines.
So many of our students, in ways big and small, are leaders. And as they’ve led, they’ve done so with conviction. Sometimes they raise their voices to be heard, and I applaud their courage. Other times, the change they make is quiet, behind the scenes, but every bit as meaningful. As we look to the future and develop a renewed vision for this work, the student experience will be at the center.
So where do we go from here? I’ve shared a few examples of our commitment and the progress we are making. Yet, the challenges we seek to address remain daunting. But no one university, educational or health care institution in the country, and no region in the world, is better poised to lead us toward solutions than the University of Washington, right here in the Puget Sound, in the state of Washington – in part, because of you.
It’s time to renew our vision, together. Over the next quarter century, we will expand our ability to turn health evidence – to use our ability to diagnose patients, populations and the planet – into actionable policies, reforms, interventions and innovations. We will enlist all UW campuses, colleges, schools and units – those that are already driven by a mandate to improve population health and those that can contribute in ways perhaps less obvious, but just as important – in this effort.
Here’s where we begin:
It starts with doubling down on our commitment to reducing health disparities here and around the globe. There is no reason your place of birth should determine the likely date of your death, or that your race or ethnicity should predestine you to greater suffering.
It continues with a determination to increase global security by tackling the challenges of environmental sustainability. It is too late to stave off some of the effects of climate change, so we must also study ways to improve resilience, especially in those communities most likely to be harmed.
Those impacted by climate change are many of the same communities stricken by poverty. Which is why we must also strive to address social, economic and environmental inequities that so often go hand in hand, around the world, and here at home.
Our students are our world’s future and we will seek to inspire the next generation of decision-makers, who will drive evidence-based health policy guided by the strong conviction that every life has equal worth.
We will create new paths and encourage more students to pursue careers where they will do work that positively impacts population health, building synergies within the wide range of disciplines that can contribute to the mission. And we of course want these students to learn from the world’s most outstanding faculty, so we will add to the global leaders who already call the UW home.
Together, they will team up with leaders and collaborators from the communities who have the most to gain from the democratization of health evidence, unlocking the power of data for the benefit of all. We have in our pockets more computing power than could ever before have been imagined – let’s encourage people to use it for something more than Snapchat or Tinder.
The UW has excellent, world class programs in every school and college, the Puget Sound region has some of the most innovative public and private organizations in the nation, as well as progressive local governments that are excellent partners – we have all the parts that are necessary to create the change we want to see in the world. The challenge is to make sure that the sum of the parts equal more than just the sum of the parts. This initiative is about making sure the whole is greater than the sum of those parts.
It’s about catalysis and fusion across the full continuum of innovation, and disciplines, from neighborhood to transnational programs, anthropology to aeronautics, devoting our best talents and sharpest minds to finding solutions to these challenges.
That’s no small mandate. There is much to be done, and money is finite – so we must work with individuals, communities, governments and philanthropists to determine the most cost-effective and productive uses of public health and social service resources. We will engage with them – with you – in both the formation of this vision and its implementation over many years. That’s the only way to have the greatest possible impact, save the most lives, and build better, smarter, safer communities.
We will begin by engaging the entire community in the development of this initiative. A team of leaders from across the University has been putting ideas together – but this must be a collaborative initiative and we will be bringing more voices to the table. Even as we look at the range of actions we could take, including the possibility of new degrees in population health and ways to encourage more students to investigate population health-related questions, we’ll need more guidance from a broader range of faculty and from our community and governmental partners.
Within the next few weeks, I will appoint a Population Health Leadership Council to begin this work, and develop a long-range, University-wide plan. The Council, which I will chair, will consist of deans in the health sciences and from engaged colleges and schools – such as Arts & Sciences, Environment, Engineering, Education, Public Policy and Governance, and Law, as well as faculty and staff representing important contributing programs and stakeholder units on all three campuses. It will begin by taking an inventory of existing programs, opportunities, and partnerships related to population health. I expect that after this talk I’ll get e-mails about the important initiatives and programs I failed to mention, and that’s a good thing.
That inventory will be followed by the launch of a University-wide visioning effort this fall. I will ask the Council to develop recommendations for phase one by January 2017, with a full 25-year vision and action plan to follow. An external advisory council, comprised of representatives from our regional and world partners will also be essential to ensure we leverage our collective efforts to the greatest possible good. And we will consult closely with faculty and student governance to evaluate our progress and priorities, and to ensure alignment with the imperatives of diversity, equity, and inclusivity.
The implementation plan that we develop, together, will be part of our strategic planning, ensuring that it will be a priority for resource allocation and program development. Additionally, securing the resources needed for this effort will be a priority for the campaign that we’ll launch this October, as well as a when we meet with policymakers in Olympia and Washington, DC. (And, for those of you that worry about this kind of thing – it won’t detract from what you’re doing – it will bring them together. We all have something to contribute.)
To get this right will require deep reflection and analysis, flexibility, openness to changing course when needed, a sense of urgency, and determination to succeed. Some resources are limited – but our spirit is boundless. And we have so many partners and potential partners around the Sound, and experts in allied fields – in everything from cancer research to data visualization, from transportation and logistics, to personalized customer experiences – all the fields that are vital to doing work globally on a personal scale. Just feel the unique potential that exists here, now – right in this room!
The University of Washington, the Puget Sound region and our state can lead the world in improving population health. It’s time to take that mantle – together.
I started my comments today talking about a community. I want to close by talking about a person.
She was born into a comfortable life, though that comfort was soon shattered by political upheaval. She and her family had to flee their country, and the comfort they’d experienced was lost in the moment they became refugees. Her highly educated parents worked in shoe factories to support the family. Though they had little money, what they did have was optimism and a belief that education was the key to a better life.
She and her family also had the good fortune to come to this country, in a time when the divide between rich and poor was narrowing, not widening, and when higher education was more attainable. She went to college with the help of scholarships, and there she found mentors – and a calling.
If you haven’t guessed, the girl who came to a new land was me. And, despite some considerable obstacles – I’ll never forget the sacrifices my parents made for me – I must also acknowledge my privilege, the opportunities I was given, and the good fortune I’ve had, which all far exceed the opportunities available today to billions of people around the world, and millions right here at home. Opportunities to live truly healthy lives, enabling them to reach their full potential and fully contribute to a society that needs all our talents to move forward.
That’s what drives me and our University. It’s what inspires us – faculty, staff, students, at the UW and our many partners.
It’s why I’m calling upon you to join me. It’s why I’m calling on all of us to use our collective talents to improve the health and well-being of people – some we’ll never meet, some we pass every day on the street, and some in our own families. Because I know if we come together, as scholars, as leaders, as innovators and as human beings, grateful for the chances we’ve been given, we can truly create a world of good.
[Each year, Pacific Northwest law firm Foster Pepper hosts “Wine, Women and What’s Happening,” an event that brings together a diverse group of women leaders from around the community and across different industries. This year, President Cauce delivered the keynote address. Remarks as prepared for delivery.]
Hello everyone. I want to start by thanking all of you for your support of the UW. I know we have alumnae here, we have parents and family members of our students – and as taxpayers and friends, you are all a part of the UW family, part of what makes our university a one of the world’s great public universities, so thank you. The University of Washington is your university and we’re proud to serve you.
And a big thank you, Judy, for that kind introduction. As a former teacher, you understand how important education is to building a healthy, thriving society. And as a graduate of the UW School of Law, we are so proud to claim you as one of our own. Your work for non-profit and charitable organizations has helped improve life for people in the Puget Sound Region, especially women, and I’m honored by your invitation to speak here today.
This may be the first time I’m meeting some of you, and since you asked me to, I thought I would begin with a little bit of my own story. Since I became the “official” president of the University of Washington last October, I’ve said that if you held up pictures of all the UW presidents in history, even a 2-year-old could point out the one who’s not quite from central casting. I’m proud of the many “firsts” I represent, and I’m also proud to have been an internal candidate, because the UW and Seattle are my home.
I came to the UW in 1986 to teach in the psychology department as a clinical psychologist. I was new to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, and, to be honest, I didn’t really expect to stay here forever. But a funny thing happened – I fell in love with this place. It seemed to me to be a place where you could do big things. And it is! I see that over and over at the UW, and the accomplishments of all of you in his room are also a testament to achievements of this community.
This place, the Puget Sound, was like nowhere I had ever lived – the mountains that seemed to rise from the sea; the forces of nature everywhere. The unlimited possibilities to reach and create – it inspired me then and it inspires me today.
You may have heard I was born into a family that fled from Cuba to Miami when I was a toddler. My parents, like many immigrants, were educated people forced to take factory jobs to support their children. And though they had little money, what they did have was optimism and a belief that education was the key to a better life.
That belief sustained and fueled me through my education and eventually led to, not just a career, but a calling as an educator. I went to college with the help of scholarships and I’m profoundly grateful for the sacrifices my parents made that have allowed me to stand here today. It’s why ensuring students have access to excellent education has been and continues to be a priority for me. And it’s what drives me – every day – to make this world a better place.
How does this translate into my leadership at the University of Washington? It means the crucial work we do on behalf of both Access and Excellence is deeply personal to me.
The UW provides access to an outstanding education to more than 40,000 students on three campuses and thousands more through online programs. Washington students are our priority and we are educating and preparing the young people of our region in record numbers, particularly those students who are from modest means and underrepresented groups. I’m so proud that fully a third of our students are the first in their families to attend college. We admit students without consideration of financial means and, thanks to the Husky Promise, ,low-income students who enroll at the UW will have support — nearly 32% of our Washington students – those who need our support the most — pay no tuition at all.
You’ll never hear me brag about the rise in the average entering SAT score or GPA of our incoming freshmen. Our goal is to admit the most students who will do the most good for the world. It’s to attract and welcome innovators and big thinkers, who bring uncommon perspectives and a drive to do. Because innovation is what we do very well at the UW – you don’t even have to take my word for it: Reuters has ranked the UW as the most innovative public university IN THE WORLD.
Now innovation comes from the other half of the equation which is EXCELLENCE. The UW’s impact on our students’ lives and on the vitality of our region and the world is made possible by decades of investment in academic excellence at all levels. Our research impact is well known – name pretty much any issue you are concerned about – national security, heart disease, your child’s learning patterns or the transportation problems in our region – and I can promise you that UW faculty and students are influencing that issue positively. What is perhaps less well known is the incredible teaching – and teachers – that also impact our students every day as faculty and students work together in the Husky Experience. More than 8,000 students participate in hands-on research with top faculty in their fields. Thousands of students embark on internships and service trips annually. I like to say this is a place where we take motivated students of modest means, expand their vistas and launch them into the stratosphere – where they do remarkable, world-changing things.
Now, when I talk about innovation at the UW, I’m talking about inclusive innovation – new ideas, new jobs, new companies created to tackle the challenges that face our city, our region and our world. Innovation that considers not just how we can “disrupt” but also who is being disrupted and how innovation can contribute to the public good.
Which brings me one of the major priorities for the UW that I discussed publicly for the first time yesterday.
I believe that one of – if not the biggest ways the UW can innovate in the service of public good is to put our collective talents to work improving the health and well-being of people here in the Pacific Northwest and all over the world. Yesterday, I invited our community to join in developing a new vision to put our collective excellence to good use. I shared the first steps for establishing a 25-year vision for how the UW, together with the incredible organizations and people in this region, can take work to better people’s lives by deepening our commitment to what we are calling Population Health. Like the Race & Equity Initiative the UW launched last year to combat racism and promote equity and diversity on our campuses, this vision of Population Health is about improving lives and tackling hard problems. And, not coincidentally, many of those problems are interrelated with issues of race and equity.
So, on the heels of yesterday’s talk, I’m very pleased to have the chance to share a bit about that vision with you today, because as I look around this room, I see a lot of leaders invested in the success and well-being of this community, and we need powerful people – powerful women! – to join us in making the vision of transforming public health a reality.
Seattle is one of the world’s great cities. It’s a boom town, and it may seem as if wealth and happiness are plentiful. But for many people in our city and region, the boom has passed them by, or worse, made their lives harder and more tenuous.
Many people in our city and region – our neighbors – face daily trials that are largely invisible to the world. Their children may go to underfunded or declining schools, and they may arrive at those schools hungry or malnourished. They themselves may be facing violence, drugs, or disease, and often they can’t afford to miss work to take care of a sick child or get treatment for themselves when they need it.
They may face racism and discrimination, and find themselves trapped in a multi-generation cycle of poverty. Right here in Seattle, a distance of a few miles can mean a difference in life expectancy of more than a decade. Ours is a city of opportunity, yes. But that opportunity is too often determined not by how hard you work, but by where you were born.
So what do we mean by population health? It includes more than just the absence of disease, though that’s important. Our University plays a crucial role in discovering new treatments and cures for a wide range of diseases and conditions, from emerging diseases like Zika to age-old maladies like cancer. Couple that with our work in developing countries, and the more than $275 million in charity care provided here at home by UW Medicine, and it’s clear that – with your support – our University plays an essential role in helping people live longer, happier lives here and all around the world.
Yet, there are many conditions intertwined with physical and mental health: from nutrition and education, to pollution and issues of equity. And there are many ways one can fall – or be pushed – into poverty. By identifying and addressing the causes and impacts of a broad swath of well-being indicators for populations of people – from neighborhoods to countries – we have an opportunity to truly impact health in profound ways. We have an opportunity to improve the population health of the world.
Amplifying that opportunity is the fact that, here in the Puget Sound region, there are more than 130 organizations working on population and global health. From the Gates Foundation and PATH, to organizations focusing on individual nations or specific maladies, there are few places on Earth with more opportunities for collaboration and collective impact than right here. As a global hub for computing and information technology, we have at our disposal more talent and computing power than has ever before been assembled. Big data, for example, allows us to expose and understand patterns, enabling us to diagnose – and treat – not just individuals, but entire cities – even nations.
So how do we, together, shape and implement a vision for our region over the next two and a half decades?
We start by expanding our commitment to reducing health disparities here and around the globe. Your place of birth should not determine your lifespan. Your skin color should never predestine you to greater suffering.
This vision continues with a determination to increase global security by tackling the challenges of environmental sustainability. Some of the effects of climate change cannot be forestalled, so we must also study ways to improve resilience, especially in those communities – poor communities – most likely to be harmed. And we must strive to address the social and economic inequities that make communities poor in the first place.
We will also seek to inspire the next generation of decision-makers, who will drive health policy with strong evidence and even stronger convictions. We will create new paths for students to pursue careers in population health, building synergies within the wide range of disciplines that can contribute. And we of course want these students to learn from the world’s most outstanding faculty, so we will add to the global leaders who already call the UW home.
Together, they will team up with leaders and collaborators from the communities who have the most to gain from the democratization of health evidence, unlocking the power of data for the benefit of ALL. We have in our pockets more computing power than could ever before have been imagined – let’s encourage people to use it for something more than Snapchat (or Tinder).
I believe there is no region and no university better poised to lead us toward solutions than the Puget Sound region and the University of Washington. I believe everyone in this room (and many outside of it) can contribute to the success of this vision, so that together, we can help people around the world, and right here at home, lead healthier, safer, happier and more fulfilling lives.
That’s what inspires me as a scholar. It’s what motivates me as president. And it’s what drives me as a citizen of this community and of this world.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to visit with you tonight. I look forward to meeting those of you I haven’t met yet, and to working with all of you on this and on a range of other priorities for your University and our community. And I‘m happy to answer your questions.
It’s an honor to be here in support of an organization that has such a profound and positive impact on the communities it serves across Seattle and in King and Snohomish counties. The YWCA has a mission that couldn’t be clearer: To eliminate racism, empower women and promote peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all.
[The University of Delaware’s Center for the Study of Diversity holds an annual Distinguished Lecture on Diversity, delivered this year by President Cauce. Remarks as prepared for delivery.]
Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here, or really, to be back here, at the University of Delaware, where I taught in the 1980s as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. I want to thank Acting President Targett, Provost Grasso and Vice Provost for Diversity Henderson for welcoming me back to this wonderful institution, where you are daring to do great things for Delaware. And I want to offer a special thank you to Professor James Jones and the Center for the Study of Diversity who invited me here today.
I consider Professor Jones a mentor. Mentors are those people who you can turn to for guidance knowing that they will provide wise counsel AND that they will have your best interests in mind. Professor Jones always did just that. Director of the APA Minority Fellowship Program when I was a Fellow, he always went above and beyond to get to know us, even visiting the fellows at their home institutions. He’d call to see if all was well, connect me to opportunities for additional funding or tell me about a conference I should attend.
Even after I graduated we’d stay in touch. When he invited me to serve on the selection committee for MFP, I of course said yes. Being able to serve alongside him on this faculty, even if for a brief period of time, and winning an award that bears his name, were both amongst my proudest and most humbling experiences, so thank you Jim!
I want to start by acknowledging my own privilege. While some of you know my path hasn’t always been easy, I have certainly been given a hand or encouraged at certain points along the way that made a tremendous difference. I am grateful for that, and acknowledge that all of us begin this conversation from different places and points of view.
These past few years, up to and including the present moment, have been painful for those of us who view diversity and equity as core values; who believe in not only respecting, but also celebrating differences; who believe in justice and fairness; and who hold dear the idea that all men and women were created equal and should have equal opportunities to achieve their chosen goals and contribute to society.
We have witnessed violence and oppression aimed at people of color with little or no repercussions for the perpetrators. African-Americans, particularly young African-American men, have been gunned down in the street or stopped by police merely for walking while black. Once unimaginable xenophobic rhetoric is leveled at Muslims and immigrants in the public square. Women are still subjected to men in power discussing their bodies and their rights with scant recognition that they are autonomous beings.
In the span of just a few weeks last fall, Inside Higher Ed reported that more than a dozen college campuses were the targets of shooting and bomb threats, with many of them specifically threatening black students. We know that all too often, violence on campus is not merely a threat, but frighteningly real.
Some incidents have hit close to home. At my own institution, the University of Washington, last spring racial epithets were hurled at UW students who were marching in support of the basic truth that Black Lives Matter. The Pacific Northwest and the UW can fall into the trap of thinking of ourselves as progressive on these issues. But we are not immune, and we sometimes fall short of our ideals.
Here at the University of Delaware, as a community, you’ve experienced some of the same tensions and anguish that the UW and society at large are experiencing. A Black Lives Matter forum held here last fall was sparked by a decoration in a tree that turned out to be innocuous. Yet, for some members of the community, the sight brought to mind nooses and the specter of lynching. The peaceful rally and passionate testimony that followed were a powerful reminder that minority members of the community see the world through a lens of experience very different from the majority: implied threats and the iconography of violence are neither new to nor imagined by black and brown Americans. Your community took the opportunity to create a teaching and learning moment — a moment not just to ensure that community issues could be heard, but also to make sure we all were listening.
The terrible violence and threats of violence we have seen across the nation, on campus and off, have been disheartening. But we have also seen inspiring responses.
At the University of Missouri, we have seen how powerful student action can be as student leaders, activists, and athletes took a stand against a pervasive environment of racism and, importantly, systemic inattention to the problem. Institutions including Amherst, Princeton and Harvard Law are being asked to reconsider how – or if – modern values can be reconciled with the names and images of institutional benefactors with abhorrent histories of racial injustice. In Rhode Island, students from Brown University and Providence College joined forces in solidarity against racism, leading to a major investment in diversity by Brown. And at the UW, we have launched what we’re calling the Race & Equity Initiative, a wide-ranging campaign to combat and eliminate racism and injustice on our campus and in our world.
What happens in academe is often a reflection of the larger world, and many of the ways in which inequality and the status quo are enforced and entrenched in the university are mirrored in the institutions and paradigms that make up western society. Explicit bigotry, racist taunts and overt discrimination are only the crudest and most visible products of a culture that is inside all of us, passed down over generations, in our cultures and histories, imbibed by new immigrants as they arrive on our shores. But it’s often subtle, sometimes out of our own consciousness.
That is why we have to actively struggle to get beyond it. We can’t just will it or ignore it away. We have to become culturally aware and self-aware.
So why, in 2016, is this the state of affairs? Why is progress so slow?
Fixing injustices means fixing broken systems, and to do that we must first understand and acknowledge that social, racial, economic and – timely, given that today is Earth Day – environmental justice all intersect. Political failure and racial segregation in Flint, Michigan created the conditions that allowed the city’s water supply to be poisoned with lead, and it’s the poor and the people of color in Flint who suffer the worst effects. It’s their children who will endure the legacy of that massive, systemic failure.
But all systems are run by people, and, our universities are populated with smart, caring, supposedly progressive, forward looking people – here in Delaware and at the UW, the youth and hope of our future. So why, then, do these problems persist on college campuses?
I was interested to read that the National Study of College Freshmen, conducted by UCLA, a study that’s been tracking the attitudes of college students nationwide, found that this generation of students views itself as committed to and comfortable with diversity.
More than 80 percent of this year’s college freshmen said that their ability to work with peers of different cultures and races was either “somewhat strong” or a “major strength.” This is a generation that clearly knows, and seems to embrace, that diversity is important to learning and preparing for success in the global marketplace.
It seems incongruous, then, that college campuses should be the setting for so much ugliness and racial tension.
Maybe part of the answer lies in another question from the UCLA study. Only about 45 percent of all freshmen believed their knowledge of other cultures or races was even somewhat strong.
This shouldn’t surprise us; our neighborhoods and schools have become more segregated since the ’70s. We don’t know much about difference because we live with people who are like us. This homogeneity is often based on class, but race and class in this country go hand in hand. College campuses like this one are generally the most diverse settings our students have ever been in. That makes it the right place to change the equation. But that also requires putting in the time to learn about others and to look inside ourselves, at our own upbringings, at what we heard our parents and neighbors whisper, at what we’ve sometimes thought or felt before we caught ourselves.
I think these two seemingly incompatible beliefs — embracing diversity but lacking knowledge of other cultures — emerges, side by side, in this data, because this generation was raised on the notion that we can be “color blind” or culture blind or gender blind. They were raised to believe these things no longer matter, or worse yet, that the way to fix whatever bias or prejudice that might still exist is to become willfully blind to it. You don’t need to know about differences to work across them, so the thinking goes, because differences just don’t matter.
But is this blindness really a good thing? And whose color, gender, faith or culture are we erasing when we go blind? What’s being “whitewashed,” so to speak?
I can remember being a brand-new assistant professor when I had just given a colloquium focusing on youth of color, when one of my colleagues commented positively about my talk and then said to me, “You know, I’ve never thought of you as a Latina. You don’t act like one.” And this was clearly supposed to be a compliment! A compliment to his enlightenment, and perhaps to the fact that I could “talk real good.”
I felt like screaming, “What’s the problem with acting like a Latina, whatever that means? That’s who I am! And why the heck should that be a problem?”
W.E.B. Dubois, the first black Harvard Ph.D., founder of the Niagara Movement that laid the foundation for the NAACP, and mentor to my mentor Jim Jones, put it best when he said in his book “The Souls of Black Folk”: “Being a problem is a strange experience — peculiar even for one who has never been anything else.”
Maybe it’s time to reset the equation and admit that, first, we are not color blind — nor should we be. And more importantly, that we cannot just escape our history and biases by pretending they don’t exist.
Instead, we must begin by facing up to them!
When I was teaching about intelligence testing in our clinical graduate program, one of my mentees, an African-American young woman, very proudly told the class that the sequencing of the human genome showed that the genetic overlap between races was 99.9 percent. A young man in the class followed her comment by sharing that the overlap between humans and chimpanzees is 96 percent (this is true; indeed, the overlap with mice is 85 percent, but that was not the point).
I knew the young man; he was pretty clueless about what he’d just said — about how he’d indirectly made the comparison between African-Americans and apes, a comparison with a long and difficult and tortured history, a history that still stings and still has power. The young woman’s face had fallen.
He hadn’t meant it that way, of course, but the pain and insult was still real.
Cluelessness is no excuse.
Lack of knowledge about the histories and cultures of those different than ourselves, coupled with confidence that we can work with others from different races and cultures, are the perfect ingredients for a Molotov cocktail, ready to explode at any minute. So, we shouldn’t be that surprised when it does.
So what can we do — what must we do — as the University of Washington, as the University of Delaware, as students and educators, as Americans and as humans? After all, this is what universities are all about. Universities are places of discovery, of civil discourse, of difficult conversations that sometimes make us uncomfortable — places where we learn new ways of looking at and acting in the world. So how can we use make use of these crucibles?
First, we can speak up and reject jokes or language that makes biased assumptions about people of color, or women, or the undocumented, or about those in wheelchairs, or, or…. They are not only untrue, but damaging.
It can be hard to go against the flow, but it’s important to say clearly that racist jokes aren’t funny, that offensive speech offends us, that we won’t be a party to it and to be prepared to walk away.
This is especially important for the people in power, the “mainstream” or “the majority” — we cannot just shift the burden to speak out onto the aggrieved party. It’s not their problem, and when they say something, it is often viewed as defensive.
When someone has the courage to say that a remark or an assumption was hurtful or insensitive, we can’t reflexively respond with “I didn’t mean it.” It’s not about what was meant, it’s about what is experienced by other people. Let’s start by saying “I’m sorry, that was insensitive. I won’t do it again.” And then not do it again.
Second, we must learn about others who are different than us, not just through human contact, but also through reading and education.
It’s the responsibility of the powerful, the people included by default, to put in the time and energy to analyze and problem-solve. It’s not the job of the aggrieved party to educate us. (And it’s usually not that hard to figure out.)
With broader knowledge, experience and awareness of other people and cultures, we’ll all be less likely to make offensive comments in the first place.
Third, let’s take the time for self-examination and reflection. Look into our hearts and heads and analyze what’s there. Be fearless. Whether you’re black or white or brown, Native American or Asian, straight or gay, we all have racial, or gender, or other stereotypes and biases and prejudices — it is impossible to grow up in this society without them. But we can learn to catch ourselves, to change our ingrained impulses, until that becomes second nature.
With time and effort, habits and thought patterns can and do change. We can get past our biases and connect — and make our world bigger and truly boundless. To my fellow educators, you have a precious opportunity to model this behavior and pass on these values to the young people who look to you for guidance and direction.
But it’s not just what we do individually, it’s what we do collectively — and as an institution.
Several years ago, the New York Times wrote about a neuroscientist investigating the roots of prejudice and noted that we have been conditioned to wear seatbelts, recycle, and eat more vegetables, but “What has not come so easily is persuading us to identify with — or even tolerate — people we perceive as outsiders…. [T]he killing of a single unarmed black teenager might prompt thousands to protest in the streets. But social policies that address the problems behind individual fates — programs to combat poverty or racial bias in policing — remain as polarizing as ever.”
Universities have not only the opportunity but also the obligation to do the work of persuading, to powerfully and consistently signal to students, through our words and actions, that inclusion, equity and fairness don’t have to be “polarizing.”
At the UW, are that work is happening all over the university and through the Race & Equity Initiative I mentioned. That initiative is a work in progress, and we’re still figuring out, and working on, what this Initiative will look like and what the different steps will be. But, in many ways it has already started — we’re following the lead of our students who said loud and clear that Black Lives Matter, and of our faculty who immediately organized a teach-in, and of the staff members in the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity who have already been working on a new Diversity Blueprint, and have initiated a series of Community Conversations to learn how to better support the communities we serve.
The initiative includes the review and implementation of recommendations from the Bias Response Task Force, which has been asked to examine how we can improve the UW’s ability to receive and respond to incidents of bias and discrimination. And it will involve work we do on faculty search committees to make sure members know about implicit bias and how it can hinder a meritocratic hiring process.
There is much work to be done, but the UW is deeply committed to doing it, and doing it well.
Here at the University of Delaware, good, important work is also underway – through the Center for the Study of Diversity, through the Center for Global and Area Studies and through the work of Vice Provost for Diversity Carol Henderson, who said recently, “Diversity is not just my office or me, but it’s the ways in which we engage with each other every day of the year and we need students to be part of that discussion and part of that practice.”
I applaud the work being done at UD, including the creation of a diversity action plan, founded on the recognition and appreciation of all human differences. By all accounts, the development of that plan, — conceived as an extension of the Delaware Will Shine strategic plan — has been and continues to be a truly inclusive and thoughtful process.
Important research and scholarship on these issues is also happening here. The CSD’s model of Diversity Competency, the “DC6” holds great promise as a tool to apply greater rigor and meaning to the university’s multicultural course requirement. By requiring that courses meet consistent and substantive criteria to qualify for the requirement, not only will student learning and awareness of diversity increase, but the institution as a whole is sending a clear signal that diversity MATTERS, that inclusion and cross-cultural understanding are not just rubber stamps or lip service.
Dr. Stephanie Fryberg of the UW conducted research with Dr. Rebecca Covarrubias of this institution, which they actually presented here last year as part of the CSD’s Symposium for Student Success. Fryberg and Covarrubias conducted an intervention with American Indian middle-schoolers in which they reframed education in terms of cultural and familial concepts of American Indian groups rather than white, middle-class European concepts. The Indian students’ motivation increased and their performance on national tests improved, and no wonder – getting a taste of the cultural validation that the majority experiences every day promotes an appetite for learning.
In a similar vein, the CSD is doing interesting and valuable research on the subject of microaggressions. These kinds of routine, almost invisible (to the aggressor at least) exchanges that reinforce a person’s membership in a minority group are real and persistent and they add up. They can also be inflicted by those of us who consider ourselves to be above such things, including me, meaning I’ve got more to learn, too. And let’s be clear: it’s not the job of the aggrieved to “grow a thicker skin” or shake it off; it is the job the majority to think, listen, learn and ultimately, do better.
I want to return, for a moment, to a few of the characteristics that the Diversity Competency Model identifies as core to interacting respectfully and productively with different kinds of people, particularly the concepts of “diversity self-awareness” and “personal and social responsibility.”
I was born in Cuba — and in Cuba, like most Caribbean countries, racism has its own distinct look and feel. Words that would sound racist in this country, like “mi negrita” (my black one), are terms of endearment. But, that doesn’t mean that a color line doesn’t exist, although it may be placed in a different part of the color spectrum.
I learned from my parents that I was lucky to be light-skinned — my religious aunt, who went to Mass every day and who taught me compassion and charity, also taught me that white skin was a gift from God, so we should be extra kind to those who were darker.
How incredibly condescending and “white” of her.
They were good people, whom I admire and love to this day — but they held beliefs that I won’t sugarcoat by calling them anything other than racist. And they weren’t so great about gender equity either. They laughed at men who were “effeminate,” and, by the way, they also thought Anglos had loose morals.
Because they had no real power, at least not in this country, the effects of their biases didn’t extend far.
But knowing what I know about families and familial influence, not to mention all I know about the larger societal context and how it affects us, in my most honest moments I have to ask: How can these biases, these prejudices, this racism not be part of who I am? And because I am in a position of power, it can matter, so I must be self-aware and I must be personally and socially responsible.
Achieving self-awareness is much harder than it sounds! The powerful and those in the majority must do the difficult work of learning and acknowledging that a lack of awareness inevitably leads to the – often inadvertent – creation of a hostile climate for those in the minority.
This is a room full of leaders and future leaders and what you believe, how you act, will matter.
This change will not happen overnight, much to the dismay of some of the student activists I engage with – and to my disappointment too. And, let’s be candid, there is and probably always will be a tension between what students activists are calling for and what can actually be achieved. As an administrator, the challenge is keeping the dialogue and engagement productive even when we can’t always come to complete agreement.
There’s no question that student activism plays an important role in driving change and progress in universities, and at many moments in history, well beyond the campus. I mentioned earlier the University of Missouri protests that resulted in the president stepping down, but other examples that come to mind include the Columbia Apartheid protests that led to that university’s divestiture from companies that did business with that regime, and ongoing fossil fuel divestment protests at colleges and universities around the country. As result of that movement, over 470 institutions have divested $2.6 trillion in fossil fuel investments.
But student activism also plays a part in educating students about the reaches – and limits – of their power, and about how (and how not) to engage productively in debate with the decision makers. Sometimes student demands cannot be met; they may be logistically, legally or financially impossible, or they may curtail others’ right to speak. That UCLA national study that I mentioned earlier also found that about 71 percent of freshmen surveyed said that “colleges should prohibit racist or sexist speech on campus,” which is the highest percentage of positive responses to that question on record. Support for banning “extreme speakers” from campus has also increased. It’s clear that the line between inclusivity and the muzzling of disparate viewpoints has never been thinner or harder to walk.
As an administrator, being the subject of protests has taken some getting used to, mostly because historically, I’m more used to being on the side of the protesters.
Several years ago, when I was appointed Chair of American Ethnic Studies at UW, I knew I was dealing with a fraught and politicized situation, but I was not prepared for the onslaught; my first day on the job, I found the hallway outside my office papered with a picture of me with cross-hairs superimposed on my face and emblazoned with the headline “Under Fire.” Students protested my appointment with a sit-in that shut down the administration building during a Regents meeting. I had to dig deep within myself to find my center.
When you grow up wielding power from the margins, the move to the center can be very jarring. But I think that experience has been valuable to me in that it has allowed me to assume positive intent on the part of student activists, even when the rhetoric gets rough and sometimes personal. As educators and administrators, part of the job is remembering that students really are in it for the right reasons, and, if we can remember that we share a vision of a better world, we can keep moving forward toward it.
At the University of Washington, we are guided by the words “Be Boundless,” and inequality is anathema to that ideal. Being boundless does not mean pretending that we are or even should be color blind; rest assured, black and brown people can’t forget they are black and brown in a white-dominated society. And lesbian, gay and trans people can’t ignore the ignorant and often hateful things that are said and even legislated at their expense. Women can’t disregard the reality of the gender wage gap that pays them 79 cents for every dollar their male counterpart receives. Being boundless means not just accepting but welcoming and making space for diversity in ways that enhance the entire community’s experience and understanding.
While I’ve talked about some of my personal experiences and the responsibility of the individual, as president of an institution that in many ways shapes the city of Seattle and the whole Pacific Northwest region, I am perhaps most concerned about the effects of systemic or institutional racism, the biases and barriers that diminish our capacity as a society, or in this case, as a university, to truly fulfill our public promise of both access and excellence, indeed of access to excellence.
I believe that conversations like this one, initiatives like the Diversity Action Plan and investment in institutions like the Center for the Study of Diversity the Center for Global and Area Studies are how we start to grow our own awareness, learn to hold ourselves accountable, and finally, to stop being the problem, through change and action.
After all that I’ve said here today, the message I want to leave you with is this: I am hopeful. I’m immensely hopeful, because these conversations are happening and young people are engaged on the issues that matter. Yes, we continue to see racism, and misogyny and transphobia and homophobia, but it’s worth noting that we ARE seeing it, and speaking up about it and doing something to end it. However painful it is to be faced with these problems, it will be far more painful, maybe even fatal in the long run, if we don’t face them. We do that by linking arms and working together, by talking and, more importantly, listening. There is work to be done, and I know we can do it.
When I launched the Race & Equity Initiative almost a year ago, I noted that these were difficult times for those of us who view diversity and equity as core values, who believe in justice and fairness, and who are committed to making this an inclusive and openhearted campus for all. Many of our students, along with faculty and staff, have taken strong stands in opposition to the bias and racism that is present in our society and on our campuses, both from individuals but also embedded in our institutional structures. And they continue to stand in support of needed change.
From marches and public demonstrations to coalition-building and engaging with the administration, faculty, staff and students across all campuses are working to bring about change through many venues. We welcome and encourage your involvement. To the extent possible, we will be using the Race & Equity webpage as a place to inform you of the work taking place across our campuses to address equity and social justice issues. You will find new information there about the progress we have made to date, resources on diversity efforts on all three campuses and actions planned for this spring and summer, many of which address specific issues raised in recent months.
Change, especially when it is long overdue, is always too slow. This may be especially the case in colleges and universities, where power is distributed and change rarely takes place in a top-down fashion. I recognize this, as do my colleagues in positions of leadership at the UW. Racism and bigotry have no place on our campuses; we condemn any and all incidents of this nature here (and everywhere!). They are antithetical to our mission as a public university, and as a place for learning and promoting the health and welfare of all members of our community, state, nation and world. So I am taking this opportunity to reiterate that we stand in solidarity with all of you who oppose oppression and inequity.
I am very grateful for the hard work that the Race & Equity Steering Committee is taking on, on behalf of all of us. There is no doubt that there will be missteps, miscues and challenges along the way, as we struggle with problems that have vexed society across the ages. But we are 100% committed to listening to your concerns and making changes for the better. Together, we can make progress toward equity and inclusion and toward building the kind of university and world that will allow ALL of us the opportunity to realize our human potential.
Mark this webpage, so you can return to it to track our progress and learn about new initiatives. Let’s keep the dialogue open and thank you for staying engaged.
President Cauce has announced that Jerry Baldasty, interim provost for the past 13 months, is the preferred candidate for UW provost and executive vice president. Read her message to faculty, staff and students about his selection and a public forum on April 26.
The forum is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. at the Henry Art Gallery Auditorium. It will be streamed live from the provost’s website.
Our city is facing a crisis. Thousands of our neighbors are forced to make their homes in doorways or under bridges since they lack affordable housing. Consistent with our public mission, the University of Washington has been seeking solutions to the homelessness crisis through scholarship and service. But we have an opportunity to do more.
Earlier this year, I commissioned a working group to assess the feasibility of hosting an organized tent city encampment on the Seattle campus for 90 days during the 2017 winter quarter. Tent cities are by no means a permanent answer for homelessness, but they do provide a safe place for residents to live as they seek stable housing. This working group met with representatives from Tent City 3, Seattle city government, community organizations and members of the Tent City Collective, as well as with colleagues from Seattle Pacific University and Seattle University, both of which hosted Tent City 3 on their campuses and found hosting to be a valuable educational experience for their students.
I want to single out the Tent City Collective for particular praise. Its members, which include UW students, alumni and Tent City 3 residents, have been steadfast advocates for our neighbors facing homelessness. They have also made many connections with faculty and departments eager to incorporate service learning into their curricula via the opportunities hosting an encampment would present.
The conclusion of the working group is that hosting an encampment is feasible, provided that we have community support; connect with an experienced, responsible organizer; make a decision early enough for faculty to incorporate relevant service learning into their curricula; and have detailed plans for security, safety, health and sanitation to ensure the well-being of residents and community members. Participation in UW activities related to hosting would be voluntary for our students, just as they would be for encampment residents.
I am now seeking your feedback on whether the UW should step forward and host Tent City 3 — which has an extensive track record and clear code of conduct for residents — during the 2017 winter quarter.
No taxpayer or tuition funds would be used to host the encampment, which would be limited to no more than 100 residents. There are several locations under consideration, which you can view on the Regional and Community Relations site.
There will be two open houses where you can learn more:
Monday, April 11: 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at University Congregational United Church of Christ, 4515 16th Ave. NE
Tuesday, April 12: Noon to 2 p.m. in Room 250 of the HUB
You can also share your thoughts by emailing regional@uw.edu. The goal is to make a decision by the end of the academic year in order to provide time for logistical and curricular planning.
Service to our community is central to our mission, as is providing students with experiences that help them become educated, engaged citizens. Informed feedback from the campus community and from nearby residents and businesses is vital as we consider whether to host Tent City 3, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
All around Washington and points beyond, several thousand high school seniors are experiencing the thrill of receiving a gold envelope — what some students have started calling the “golden ticket” — in the mail. It’s their future arriving, in the form of a letter announcing that they’ve been admitted to the University of Washington.
This is a defining moment for these admitted students — one you can witness on social media via #NewHuskies2016 — and for us, as with each incoming class our University is renewed. Over the coming months, these students will visit our campuses for admitted student preview days and informal tours. I encourage us all to give them a warm welcome. After all, they chose the UW because of you and your reputation for excellence.
Our students are the embodiment of our public promise to serve as an engine for personal growth and societal well-being and prosperity. They will come from every corner of Washington and beyond, though the physical distance many of them will travel will be smaller than the socioeconomic divides they’ll cross on their journey.
For example, last year Seattle’s Franklin High School ranked sixth among all high schools for sending graduates to the UW, which I imagine is a point of pride for Principal Jennifer Wiley, who herself earned two UW degrees. Her students have faced challenges throughout their lives, with 70 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches and an unknown number having faced discrimination, whether because of their race, their nationality or their language.
As someone who knows from personal experience how access to education can change a life, I’m thrilled that we’ll be welcoming students like those from Franklin and beyond who are eager to learn with you. Helping students of modest means achieve their full potential is one of our most important missions as a public university.
As we move forward, we’ll continue to emphasize both access and excellence. And we’ll continue to look for new ways to identify and recruit a diverse range of talented and determined students, including those for whom college applications don’t tell the full story of their potential to be leaders and innovators. This includes at UW Bothell — where I held a town hall last week — and UW Tacoma, both of which have grown over the last quarter century to meet the needs of their respective communities.
Our students chose the UW because they want to learn from leaders in their fields, and at a University dedicated to innovation, discovery and positive social change. Thank you for your commitment to them, to excellence and to our shared and crucial public mission.
President Ana Mari Cauce, writing in the March edition of Columns, said the UW’s commitment to the public good aligns with its ranking as the most innovative public university in the world. She also touted the power of inclusive innovation and said homelessness is exactly the sort of challenge that cries out for inclusive innovation.
