Commitment to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI)

The Center for Undergraduate Scholar Engagement is committed to providing an inclusive and equitable space for our students and colleagues in their many forms of intersecting diversity. The CUSE strives to uphold this commitment through:  

• centering our learning on the impacts of inequity and injustice, and actively identifying ways to mitigate their harms; 

• focusing on deepening our practice as educators to encourage and support our students and colleagues of marginalized backgrounds and identities;  

• creating and sustaining a welcoming, safe space for all students, perspectives, experiences, and modalities to explore research topics important to them; 

• working intentionally to provide equity in access to CUSE services and programs and closing the disparities that societal structures create; 

• advocating that all students are capable and should pursue a deeper engagement with their education. 

In CUSE, we advance forms of student engagement that enable students to examine complex social, cultural, aesthetic, and historical issues. This includes encouraging students to reflect upon how the production of knowledge, the structures of research, and the dissemination of the outcomes of scholarship and creative expression are embedded in complex social systems with layers of structural inequities, historical blindnesses, and unjust power dynamics. We are dedicated to promoting opportunities for students to explore and successfully pursue the forms of academic engagement that match their interests and career plans. We recognize that many students have experienced barriers to academic engagement as a result of minoritized identities, lack of resources, or other forms of disparities. We are deeply committed to ensuring that all students experience opportunities at GVSU as opportunities that are created for them. We are not simply creating programs and welcoming students, but rather creating a diverse array of programs designed with our diverse student body and their needs, experiences, and career plans at the center. 

We commit ourselves to centering diverse students’, scholars’, and artists’ voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing by: 

• Providing opportunities for students to engage with research and creative work that helps them to build cultural competencies; 

• Bringing to campus scholars, activists, and artists who engage with our community in substantive dialogue upon significant issues of our day and our social climate; and 

• Continually assessing and reviewing policies, practices, and procedures to identify and remove barriers to our goal of supporting a diverse and inclusive cohort of undergraduate students engaged in research, creative expression, global exploration, and other forms of high-impact practices that carry learning beyond the classroom.