Diversity & Inclusion

Chancellor Dorothy Leland made her way to Capitol Hill this week for the first convening of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

UC Merced staff members, students and alumni participated in an experiment to help people gain a better understanding of others’ opinions without abandoning their own viewpoint or values.

Getting people to talk about polarizing topics while remaining respectful was the goal behind last week’s “3 Practices for Crossing the Difference Divide,” a two-day workshop series designed to expose campus and community members to a structured and thoughtful way of talking about differences of opinion.

UC Merced’s Vice Provost and Graduate Dean Marjorie S. Zatz was selected as one of the Top 35 Women in Higher Education in Diverse: Issues In Higher Education’s eighth annual special report recognizing the contributions of women to higher education.

The edition, in honor of Women’s History Month, marks the publication’s 35th anniversary by highlighting 35 women who are tackling some of higher education’s toughest challenges, exhibiting extraordinary leadership skills and making a difference in their respective communities.

UC Merced is partnering with UC Santa Barbara and two California State University campuses — Fresno and Channel Islands — on a project to create a more diverse STEM faculty at colleges and universities nationwide.

The quartet has been awarded a total of $2 million from the National Science Foundation’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program for a joint research project intended to increase the number of underrepresented minority faculty members in STEM fields.

The goal is to develop a model that’s applicable — and replicable.

UC Merced has long served as an educational opportunity for undocumented students and their families. A new grant will ensure the university can help more scholars realize their academic, career and personal goals.

UC Merced is one of 32 campuses that will receive support this academic year from the new California Campus Catalyst Fund. To date, the Catalyst Fund has raised nearly $10 million for a three-year initiative founded by educators, funders and advocates.

UC Merced is part of a concerted effort to dramatically increase diversity in physics and astronomy over the next five years.

The campus is one of nine University of California campuses and 15 California State University campuses awarded a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation through the Cal-Bridge North program.

A new grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will help UC Merced further diversify its community of graduate students and faculty, beginning with the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

UC Merced is uniquely positioned to be a change agent in how the academy addresses diversity in STEM, said Professor Donna Riley, the Kamyar Haghighi Head of Purdue’s School of Engineering Education.

Despite efforts to increase diversity among science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines, inclusion continues to be a struggle, said Donna Riley, professor of engineering education at Purdue University.

Riley, the Kamyar Haghighi Head of Purdue’s School of Engineering Education, will discuss how and why equity and inclusion in STEM have defied decades of research and educational innovation during the Chancellor’s Dialogue on Diversity and Interdisciplinarity lecture on Sept. 13 at UC Merced.

It’s a startling statistic: Nearly 30 percent of UC Merced students who start their college careers in the School of Natural Sciences (SNS) switch to majors outside the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields by their second year.