Duke’s Commitment to Inclusive Excellence: Q&A with Vice President for Institutional Equity Kim Hewitt

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Following a university-wide process to collect input from the community, the Office for Institutional Equity shared the final version of Duke’s Inclusive Excellence principles, a set of standards to guide Duke’s efforts to build an inclusive and welcoming environment for all students, faculty, and staff. Vice President for Institutional Equity Kim Hewitt spoke to Duke Today about the principles and how culture and belonging are evolving across the institution.

What are the inclusive excellence principles?

The Inclusive Excellence principles communicate Duke’s longstanding efforts to create a learning and working environment rooted in a shared commitment to excellence. Our goal is to foster an academic and professional community that supports diverse perspectives and experiences, where everyone can thrive and engage in respectful dialogue and learning.

Kim Hewitt will succeed Ben Reese as Duke's chief diversity officer. — Kim Hewitt, vice president for Institutional Equity

These principles are meant to communicate Duke’s overarching philosophy for creating and fostering community, which involves many different stakeholders and takes many different forms across our institution – from admissions to human resources to mentorship, scholarship, and professional development activities.

Our hope is that the principles affirm and clarify existing policies and guidelines, establish new guidelines where necessary, and reflect both our legal obligations and the values of respect, trust, inclusion, discovery, and excellence that guide our institution.

Why is Duke establishing this new inclusive excellence platform?

Recent changes at the federal level created a need to review our current policies and provide updated guidance to student and faculty leaders engaged in the important work of building and fostering the academic and professional environment for which we hold ourselves accountable. It was also important to us to clearly communicate what inclusive excellence means to Duke and how we plan to realize this commitment across our campus community. The principles, reviewed and informed by the cross-functional Inclusive Excellence Working Group, reflect broad buy-in and input from our community, and we hope this clear statement of our commitments and obligations help us move forward together.

How will students, faculty, and staff see the inclusive excellence principles in action across Duke? What will change?

The Inclusive Excellence principles affirm long-standing commitments, values and policies that have guided our institution, including our policy on discrimination and harassment, our commitment to equal opportunity and programs and activities that are open to all without regard for protected characteristics.

It is important to note that the Inclusive Excellence principles address programs and activities outside of our classrooms and labs and preserve the value of academic freedom. We do ask that everyone familiarize themselves with these principles and consider whether policies, programs or activities across their departments align with the commitments and guidance communicated in this document. The Office for Institutional Equity is here to be a resource and a partner in this process.

As we go forward, our Campus Culture Surveys will be an increasingly important tool for us to understand and respond to student, faculty and staff feedback about how we are living up to our commitments to Inclusive Excellence.

Since first launching the survey in 2021, we saw consistent participation in our 2024 survey, and improvement in the overall satisfaction of students, faculty, and staff on campus. However, we recognize that the work of creating an inclusive and welcoming campus environment for all must be a constant, ongoing effort. So, we are committed to addressing those areas where we see lesser degrees of satisfaction or the need for changes to policies and practices. We are proud of the work we have done so far and remain committed to identifying and tackling new challenges as our institution continues to grow and change.

We are working with leaders and stakeholders across the university to share the latest results and discuss ways in which we can continue to improve satisfaction across Duke’s campus. This process of soliciting regular, ongoing feedback will be critical as we work to meet the commitments outlined in the inclusive excellence principles. We are reviewing the processes we have in place to ensure we can take full advantage of the survey to understand and respond to community feedback.