Many campuses have centers for equity (often student-facing) and centers for teaching, learning and innovation (often faculty-facing). Institutions need innovation to achieve equity (in access, experience and outcomes), but they also need equity to ensure that academic innovation does not deepen divides. 

At the Summer Institute we will examine the intersection of Equity and Innovation as a fruitful focus to achieve transformative change on campuses. Plenaries and panels will address specific questions, including:

• Building on lessons learned about educational inequities during the pandemic adaptation, how can institutions build strategies for long-term transformation rooted in evidence-based pedagogies and inclusive high-impact professional learning?
• How do institutions move forward with diversity as a strategic priority in the context of financial constraints?

If permissible, we do encourage institutional teams to meet in person to facilitate teamwork.

Equity-minded and justice-focused design depends on cycles of observing, listening, reflecting and collaborating. Institutions need to bring together their efforts at collaborative data gathering, interpretation and dissemination with iterative efforts at listening to students and other stakeholders voices. 

At the Summer Institute we will examine how traditional institutional metrics can obscure the lived narratives of students, staff and faculty and the insights that can be gained from a more holistic approach to data. Plenaries and panels will address specific questions, including:

• How can we ensure that the work we undertake on issues of diversity, equity and racial justice in higher education reflect the perspectives and experiences of our current and future students, as well as an inclusive community of educators among a greater diversity of faculty and staff? 
• What are our ethical obligations around the collection and use of data?

Just as cycles of trauma (and intergenerational trauma) underlie our most persistent and intractable social issues, diversity and equity efforts cannot often move forward without acknowledging and dealing with the underlying role of trauma, individually and communally. 

At the Summer Institute we will examine how curricular, interdisciplinary and cross-campus work to bring trauma and healing into the heart of work on diversity and equity can achieve better outcomes. Plenaries and panels will address specific questions, including:

• How can institutions confront systemic injustice in all dimensions of academic practice? 
• How might efforts to ‘decolonize the curriculum’ help galvanize cross-campus efforts to address diversity, equity and justice?
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The “three-fold gains” of access, quality and costs have long been a challenge in higher education. Work over the past decade has made it clear that the “answer” to the challenge is never singular; instead it entails systemic solutions that typically employ multiple reinforcing strategies, often making new connections across typically separate domains. 

At the Summer Institute we will examine how traditional siloing of responsibility for these three goals hampers transformative change and how we better can work across institutional units. Plenaries and panels will address specific questions, including:

• How can institutions plan for the kind of systems-level, multi-path changes required to address quality, access and costs together
• How can we lower the cost of higher education to make it more affordable – for individuals and institutions?
• How can campuses ensure that issues of student diversity, equity, and success are aligned with strategies that include and empower a greater diversity of faculty and staff?
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Excellent models exist for 2-to-4 year transfer and to a lesser extent four-year to graduate program pathways. Yet the networks among different types of institutions needed to tackle issues of student access and success remain dangerously underdeveloped. 

At the Summer Institute we will examine how the paradigmatic changes over the past year in education can be leveraged to forge and deepen relationships across the education ecosystem to advance our goals of diversity, equity and justice . Plenaries and panels will address specific questions, including:

• How can private colleges and universities work at scale to adopt transfer pathway agreements between 2-year and 4-year institutions?
• How can we expand beyond the traditional focus on increasing access to college to include building equally strong networks to ensure equity of access to postgraduate educational and career opportunities?