Dear Colleagues and Students,
In the fall of 2020, Yale launched Belonging at Yale as a three-to-five-year initiative to enhance diversity, support equity, and promote inclusion within our university. We built the Belonging at Yale Five-Year Action Plan (2020-2025) to translate your ideas into action. Every school and administrative unit in the university participated, generating many initiatives. At the close of this academic year, we reached the end of the five-year plan. We invite you to read about the work we did together.
As the Belonging at Yale initiative concludes, we reaffirm our foundational commitment to sustaining a thriving community that welcomes and supports people who come from all walks of life and who hold a diverse range of perspectives and beliefs in the pursuit of knowledge, innovation, and excellence. This commitment stems from the university’s mission of advancing “outstanding research, scholarship, education, preservation, and practice.”
Our mission is best achieved in a vibrant scholarly community, whose members encounter and appraise different ideas and views, are treated with dignity and respect, and feel welcome to make their voices heard. To foster such a community, we:
- uphold free expression and open inquiry;
- recruit and support faculty, students, and staff with a wide range of experiences and expertise;
- promote programs and initiatives that offer multiple viewpoints and build connections within our university;
- and combat coercion, intimidation, and discrimination and harassment based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, race, color, national or ethnic origin, religion, age, disability, and status as a covered veteran.
In the new academic year, we will work with deans and administrative leaders to advance conversations on how we can best support each other—faculty, students, staff, and alumni from all over the United States and around the world. We look forward to being in touch in the fall semester.
Sincerely,
Kimberly M. Goff-Crews
Secretary
Vice President for University Life
Gary Desir
Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine
Vice Provost for Faculty Development
Maurie McInnis
President
Professor of the History of Art