In late May, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, fell victim to an act of unjustified police brutality. Weeks of protesting followed. The upsurge in consciousness triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted a need for a greater focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across all organizations, including business schools. Only a few days before Floyd was killed, professors from the world’s top business schools gathered for the second installment in a planned annual series of conferences on integrating DEI into business school curricula. The series’ overarching, multi-year mission is to co-develop best practices for any and all business schools looking to bring DEI-related topics into sharper focus. This year’s conference showcased interactive exercises aimed at doing just this.
Interactive exercises: engaging with diversity, equity, and inclusion
Aligned with the format of the inaugural conference, attendees presented exercises they had developed and used in class, with the attending educators participating as if they were students. Importantly, the focus this year was on exercises inherently well-suited or easily adaptable to virtual platforms such as Zoom, as befits the Covid-19 “new normal.”
For example, Adina Sterling, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, demonstrated one way of leveraging Zoom to maximize inclusion. Though it is a little-used feature, the platform allows you to “rename” yourself, i.e. customize how your name appears in the participant frame. During the conference, Sterling suggested that the professors provide the phonetic spelling of their names and their preferred pronouns. This automatically takes away some of the “otherness” of having a name or identity that is unfamiliar to the majority.
Exploring levels of intervention: personal, interpersonal, and institutional
Effective interventions around diversity operate on three interconnected levels. They provoke personal introspection and meditation on our experiences. They cause us to re-examine our interactions with others, both in and out of the workplace. And ideally, they give us a sense of how inequality operates within institutions and structures, and how to effect change on a macro scale.
Caryn Block, Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University Teachers College, demonstrated a reflective exercise using the personal level as an entry point. After a group discussion on the persistence of bias in the workplace, Block pairs up participants for what she calls a “diversity dynamics” discussion about what it means to be in the demographic minority as opposed to the majority.
Leveraging remote learning: challenges and advantages
Creating a psychologically safe space that enables honest conversations about DEI is difficult on its own and entails extra work in a remote learning environment. However, there are also upsides to running these exercises in the digital space. For example, facilitators need to redouble efforts to establish trust and reassure participants that their privacy will be protected within appropriate limits. With Zoom’s “breakout room” feature, it can be accomplished in a few clicks.
Looking ahead: institutionalizing DEI in business academia
In recent years, we have been heartened to see DEI being gradually institutionalized within business academia. At the same time, intensifying social struggles against racism demand that we speed up the pace of our evolution. Giving Black and Brown students more of a voice and representation in our classrooms is an area of particular importance. The appointment of DEI vice- and associate deans is a hopeful sign of change to come for faculty, students, and executive leadership.
