Commitments and Action Steps

First Actions

1. Engaging Our Students This Summer

Concordia’s Office of Diversity and Student Government Association (SGA) will host “Standing Together As One,” a virtual gathering and conversation for students and graduates in the Twin Cities from 7-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 24, and “Justice Makes Us Stronger” for all students in early July (date and time information to come). Please monitor Concordia’s multiple social media platforms for further details. These will be times to listen, to learn, and to support each other with empathy, vulnerability, resolve, compassion, and strength.

2. Confronting Bias Within Ourselves

Beginning with the president and the college cabinet, we will take part in implicit bias training. Self-knowledge and right action require that we recognize our own complicity in systems of racial injustice. This initiative will continue across our staff and faculty over the course of the 2020-21 year.

3. Changing the College Curriculum, Core, and Majors

Discovering the gift and beauty of human diversity, and learning the nature of power and privilege, must be integrated into students’ learning throughout their education at Concordia, regardless of their chosen major/career path. As faculty develop and reform curricula, they will engage students, seeking to hear from them ways we can incorporate the diversity of identity, experiences, and perspectives into our teaching and our coursework.

4. Developing Pathways for Community Action

Through the Office of Community Engagement, and in dialogue with the leaders of Moorhead, Fargo, and West Fargo, we will become a thoughtful and informed resource for equity, inclusion, and opportunity in our community. Concordia must model the work for justice that we expect our students to practice, during college and after graduation. We need to learn together how to turn research and dialogue into action for systemic change.

Further Actions for the New Academic Year

As we reconvene in the fall, expect an invitation for engagement in these endeavors:

1. Offering New Study for 2020-21

Concordia will offer a Race and Racism in Contemporary America course in the fall semester, open to all students and taught by Chief Diversity Officer Edward Antonio. We will also develop for spring a course on the topic of reparations, reconciliation, and racial healing.

2. Setting Goals and Sharing Progress for a Diverse Concordia

Concordia has invested in scholarships, partnerships, and staff positions to increase diversity in our student body. In 2020-21, we will set goals and establish dashboards to report progress on undergraduate student diversity, faculty and staff diversity, and on-time graduation for students of color.

3. Understanding the Legacy of Whiteness and the Persistence of Racial Stereotypes

The Office of Diversity will organize workshops designed to develop in us a more complete and honest understanding both of privilege and of the denial of safety, opportunity, and belonging that racial prejudice imposes.

4. Calling on the Arts

In music, and in the visual and performing arts, we will in 2020-21 examine the ways in which the arts at Concordia engage the diversity of American and world cultures—in the works they create and perform, in the students who participate, and in the audiences with whom they are engaged.