Topic: Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Blog Post
August 25, 2020
Incorporating Equity into Fall Reopening Plans
Earlier this summer, Ithaka S+R began aggregating colleges’ plans for re-opening campuses in Fall 2020, with the goal of facilitating collaboration and planning across the sector. As of August 17th, we have reviewed and synthesized 95 institutional plans, including updates to those plans, into a single resource (click here to view). We are publishing the findings from our analysis of these plans in a series of blog posts, hosted on Ithaka S+R’s…
Case Study
July 20, 2020
FEATuring YOU
A Soft Skills Training and Assessment Program for Opportunity Youth
Skills-based training and assessment technologies promise to democratize the hiring process. By automatically evaluating whether candidates possess the necessary competencies to succeed in the role to which they are applying, these tools can help eliminate human bias, diversify the talent pool, and reskill our workforce—especially appealing given that the World Economic Forum estimates a need to reskill more than one billion people in the next ten years. They are also well-suited for empowering younger learners and job candidates who are…
Blog Post
July 1, 2020
Transforming Library Leadership Strategy in a Time of Crisis
Introducing the Special Edition Library Survey 2020
Since the Library Survey 2019 survey was fielded, the COVID-19 pandemic—and more recently, organizing around the Black Lives Matter movement—has greatly impacted academic libraries and higher education as a whole. At the start of the pandemic, many libraries remained open with increases in safety protocols. Within weeks, it became clear that there would be a greater impact…
Blog Post
June 12, 2020
How Will Museums Live Up to their Solidarity Commitments?
Last week at the American Alliance of Museums Virtual meeting, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, Secretary Lonnie Bunch, and Lori Fogarty discussed the protests that have erupted across the country and around the world, in order to start a dialogue about the museum’s role in confronting structural racism in America. Since the reignition of Black Lives Matter protests by George Floyd’s murder, many museums…
Blog Post
May 26, 2020
Measuring What Matters
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in Academic Library Strategic Plans
Equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility have become buzzwords across the higher education sector with leaders at many institutions asserting these as strategic priorities and key values. In our most recent national survey of US academic library directors, conducted in fall 2019, we included new coverage of these important topics. And, now, as we face an academic year that will likely be shaped by budget cuts and re-prioritization, we wonder about the degree to…
Blog Post
January 23, 2020
Brooklyn Museum’s Paid Internship Program
When considering the themes of the art world in 2019, money seems to dominate the narrative, perhaps slightly more than usual, and from a few different angles. Jeff Koons reclaimed the title of most expensive sale of an artwork by a living artist at $90.2 million. Protests addressed the controversial philanthropy of Kanders and the Sacklers, among others. Museum staff unionized at the…
Case Study
January 23, 2020
Internship Program Evaluation
Brooklyn Museum and Citi Foundation
Citigroup and the Citi Foundation have supported two years of paid internships through the Brooklyn Museum’s education department. The $125,000 grant is part of the foundation’s “Pathways to Progress” initiative. In 2017, Citi Foundation committed $100 million to this global effort to support pathways into careers for emerging professionals. The funding allowed the Brooklyn Museum to hire twenty interns, ten for the summer of 2018 and ten for the summer of 2019. The goal for this funding was to provide…
Issue Brief
December 12, 2019
Expanding Pathways to College Enrollment and Degree Attainment
Policies and Reforms for a Diverse Population
For states to increase access to and attainment of higher education, they must implement policies and reforms that support learners who have not traditionally been well-served by higher education. By 2020, the United States is projected to have a shortage of five million workers with the adequate postsecondary education to fulfill workforce needs. States have a vested interest in and obligation to create multiple pathways to college enrollment and credential attainment that fit the needs of their diverse populations, not…
Blog Post
October 21, 2019
Getting My CLAWs into Assessment
The biennial Canadian Library Assessment Workshop (CLAW) is set to take place this week at the University of Windsor. This will be my first time attending the workshop, which primarily focuses on outcome-based initiatives and decision making to better support libraries and demonstrate their impact on research, teaching, and learning. As I eagerly await for the workshop to kick off, I’m sharing some emergent themes and takeaways from the conference…
Blog Post
July 30, 2019
Advancing Diversity and Inclusion through the Rare Book School
I’m thrilled to share that Ithaka S+R will be serving as an evaluator on the The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage, a six-year program which aims to advance multicultural collections through innovative and inclusive curatorial practice and leadership at the Rare Book School. Through this fellowship, 45 fellows who identify with diverse racial or ethnic communities and/or who work primarily with collections that document minority, immigrant,…
Past Event
June 24, 2019
Equity in the Academic Experience
Hosted by Georgetown University and University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with the American Talent Initiative
Martin Kurzweil is serving on the steering committee for the summer institute on “Equity in the Academic Experience,” to be hosted by Georgetown University and University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with the American Talent Initiative. The institute will run from June 24-26 in Washington, DC. Martin Kurzweil, Sindy Lopez, Elizabeth Davidson Pisacreta, and Emily Schwartz are participating in the institute. For more information, please see the institute’s website.
Blog Post
March 26, 2019
March Madness: Socioeconomic Diversity Edition
At Ithaka S+R, one of our primary missions is to expand educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds. Some of our programs, including the American Talent Initiative which aims to increase the number of lower-income students enrolled at the top colleges and universities in the country, focus on increasing socioeconomic diversity at higher education institutions, while others focus on improving outcomes for lower income, first generation, and underrepresented minority students at the colleges and universities where they are already more…
Blog Post
January 28, 2019
Museums Grow More Diverse, But Change is Uneven
Today we are pleased to announce the publication of the Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018. In partnership with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka S+R has conducted a study of the demographics of the art museum field. This report builds on findings from the Art Museum Demographic Survey we conducted in 2015, showing that, while some meaningful progress has been made towards…
Research Report
January 28, 2019
Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018
In order to gauge the extent to which progress has been made since 2015 towards increasing staff diversity in art museums, in 2018 we undertook a second iteration of the demographic survey. At a high level, the study has found some meaningful progress in the representation of people of color in a number of different museum functions, including the curatorial. We also found an increase in the number of women in museum leadership positions from 2015 to 2018. Nevertheless, the…
Blog Post
January 9, 2019
Redoubling Our Commitment to Museums and the Arts
In recent years, Ithaka S+R has completed a number of major research and advisory projects focusing on the museums, arts, and cultural communities. In 2019, we are redoubling our commitment through a number of new projects and growth on our team. Many in the museums community are most familiar with Ithaka S+R because of our ongoing partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), and the American Alliance of…
Research Report
December 17, 2018
A 2018 Report on the Progress of the American Talent Initiative in its First Two Years
This report offers the first look at the progress achieved during the American Talent Initiative’s first two years. Between the 2015-16 academic year (the year before ATI’s founding) and the 2017-18 academic year, ATI members increased their enrollment of low- and moderate-income students by 7,291, an increase that represents about 15 percent of the 50,000-by-2025 goal, achieved by about a third of eligible schools. During this period, more than two-thirds of ATI members increased Pell enrollment, and for about half…
Blog Post
September 20, 2018
Improving Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Art Museums
New Report Synthesizes Findings from Eight Case Studies
Over the past year, Ithaka S+R and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have partnered in a major qualitative study of equity, diversity, inclusion, and community engagement in art museums. In this project, which was conducted through detailed case studies of eight art museums, we did not find a panacea. Our work, however, finds that these eight museums have followed an array of common strategies, and through ongoing hard work have made a meaningful…
Research Report
September 20, 2018
Interrogating Institutional Practices in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Lessons and Recommendations from Case Studies in Eight Art Museums
In 2015, a demographic survey of the staff of North American art museums conducted by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and Ithaka S+R found that the staff composition of museums in the United States is not remotely representative of the country’s population....In 2015, a demographic survey of the staff of North American art museums conducted by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), American Alliance of…
Case Study
September 20, 2018
Free for All: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Upon its founding in 1948, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) was the first museum devoted to contemporary art in the region. Since its inception, this 16,000 square foot gallery, located between the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and Rice University, has responded to its rich environmental context. Houston has long been known for its remarkably diverse population, as well as its contributions to civil liberties, from Smith vs. Allwright in 1944, which ended the common practice of “white…
Case Study
September 20, 2018
Becoming a Public Square: Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit Institute of Arts Facade, Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts Located in midtown Detroit’s cultural center, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is one of the largest encyclopedic museums in the country, housing nearly 66,000 works of art. From the outside, described by many of its staff as looking like a castle on a hill, one would not guess at the museum’s turbulent history, stemming from a complex relationship with the city of Detroit. Today,…