Call to share input on diversity and inclusion proposal

The follow letter was sent to the MIT community March 30 by members of MIT's leadership team.

To the members of the MIT community,

With this letter, we share the first draft of MIT's Five-year Strategic Action Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and we invite your input. You may reply to this email or offer your feedback through the plan's website: deiactionplan.mit.edu.

Last July, President Reif announced this effort to develop and implement a comprehensive, Institute-wide action plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion – one that will be central to MIT’s overall goals and strategy. Since then, the Strategic Action Plan Steering Team provided a draft set of commitments, which were further refined and endorsed by the senior administration.

Much of the decision-making at MIT is decentralized. As an organizational strategy, this matches the intellectual and creative freedom we cherish. However, decentralization presents special challenges when we need – as we do now – to make meaningful change together. This plan aims to provide a framework for making real progress by establishing mutually agreed-upon goals. It is MIT’s attempt to deliver an explicit, directional, and aspirational set of actions to be taken by the Institute, meaning all of us. We encourage every member of the MIT community to read the draft plan and offer your questions and ideas.

For those of you in parts of the Institute already engaged in plans and programs to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we hope you will consider this MIT-wide commitment an encouraging step that can help make your local efforts more lasting and effective.

Please watch for an invitation to an upcoming community engagement session.

The comment period will be open until April 30. We expect to share a final plan by the end of the semester. 

Sincerely,

Martin A. Schmidt, Provost

Cynthia Barnhart, Chancellor

Maria T. Zuber, Vice President for Research

Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning

Glen Shor, Executive Vice President and Treasurer

John Dozier, Institute Community and Equity Officer

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