Hellenic American University was honored to welcome the prominent educator and civil rights advocate Dr. Smaw to the Athens campus where he led a workshop on May 22nd for administrative and teaching personnel on strategic planning for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB). Staff and faculty at the Nashua campus joined online.
During the session, Dr. Smaw, a philosophy professor at Rollins College and Special Assistant to its Provost for DEIB, explored with participants the steps of creating a DEIB plan. Using a set of interactive tasks, he guided participants through the process of building the planning team, securing the resources to implement it, and setting the metrics to evaluate its success. He stressed the importance of starting out by setting the key goals of the plan—its “North Star”, as he called it. He pointed out that these goals can be a mix of more ambitious objectives that will take time to implement and shorter-term ones that we can realize relatively fast and with limited resources. This way, he said, stakeholders can see that we’re making tangible progress from the start.
Dr. Smaw highlighted the need from the very beginning of the planning process to secure the broadest possible input from the community. For the University, this will also mean ensuring that the composition of the planning team reflects the spectrum of the institution’s stakeholders and the diversity of the student body. As the University’s Director of Institutional Research and Assessment Stephen Bacigal points out, “this was the model we have used in other major planning and evaluation projects, such as the Strategic Enrollment Plan. And it’s become more important with an increasingly international study body.”
University provost Dr. Themis Kaniklidou was pleased with the engagement that participants showed during the workshop. She noted, “I am optimistic that the DEI workshop led by Dr. Smaw will help us carry out our agenda for faculty and staff development and together to make the University a more equitable, diverse, and welcoming place. We were also reminded that taking action is important but not sufficient on its own: we need to communicate the changes we’re making and to measure our effectiveness—and, of course, change things if needed.”
The workshop was one of several outreach events that Dr. Smaw delivered during his stay in Athens (May 23 – June 2, 2023) and which included training sessions for the University’s newly formed Debating Club and a demonstration class on neurobiology and crime entitled “Zombies are real”.
Image: Dr. Smaw, Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at Rollins College, Special Assistant to the Provost for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.