Tracking Equity at Purdue

Purdue’s Equity Task Force was created during the Fall 2020 semester as a result of conversations the university had with students and faculty wishing to ensure an equitable environment for the Black Boilermaker community.

The Task Force was charged with the task of reviewing the current state of equity on the Purdue West Lafayette Campus and the past and present investments and initiatives designed to support more equitable experiences and opportunities across the campus. It was recognized as an institutional acknowledgement that Purdue’s progress in becoming more diverse and inclusive has been slow for people of color, and is especially lacking for Black faculty, staff and students. You can read more about the structure of the Task Force and its mission in this presentation. 

Over the last year, your representatives from the Purdue Graduate Student Government’s (PGSG) Executive Board have been in conversations with the members of the Task Force to implement initiatives specifically targeted at improving diversity at the graduate level. We invited Dr. Barrett Caldwell, Professor of Industrial Engineering and a Provost Fellow working on the implementation of Purdue’s Equity Taskforce, to speak at our October Senate meeting so that he could share more information with the larger graduate community about the Task Force and its progress.

Dr. Caldwell explained how a key objective of Purdue’s Equity Task Force is to enhance the representation, experience, and success of Black Boilermakers. He shared with a packed meeting room how he wants to help Purdue maintain its “excellent academic reputation, while providing pathways to support a greater variety of excellence.” In his remarks, Dr. Caldwell also noted how the decentralized structure of Purdue’s graduate programs sometimes complicates efforts to form unified cross-departmental solutions. For instance, whereas undergraduate admissions are more centralized, graduate admissions decisions are typically made at the departmental level.

To address the many challenges that accompany change in large institutions, Dr. Caldwell leverages his systems engineering background and his personal background as Purdue’s first tenured African American professor in Engineering to better understand how institutional structures influence policy implementation. He emphasized the importance of developing collaborative and meaningful solutions to address equity across Purdue’s many different academic departments.  

Dr. Caldwell noted one area of interest lies in tracking equity-related activities across Purdue’s academic departments and mapping that progress to ensure equity initiatives are met with transparency and accountability across departmental boundaries. In addition to improving institutional collaboration for equity-related activities at Purdue, Dr. Caldwell has also been actively involved in thinking about how the Purdue for Life Foundation can support a variety of important community level initiatives as well, such as supporting Indiana’s Black tech community.  

As Dr. Barrett Caldwell put it, “equity is about more than putting a sticker on a football helmet”.  In June 2021, the implementation team of the Equity Task Force was charged with a series of tasks, ranging from recruitment of Black students and faculty to improving their experience on campus. More recently, Purdue announced three rounds of faculty cluster hires, beyond the 2021-22 search for over 200 new faculty, as part of the Equity Task Force initiative to further diversify faculty ranks. You can read about the latest updates on the milestones of the Task Force here and see their initial action plans here.

PGSG has also been collecting survey data from Black graduate students at Purdue over the past year to better understand the barriers and challenges facing them. The survey was designed by the Purdue Graduate Student Government Diversity Ad-hoc Committee, and a draft report of our findings can be found here. Most recently, the PGSG Senate also passed a resolution encouraging the Purdue administration to establish an advocacy and support space for students against racism and xenophobia. While PGSG legislations do not automatically create policy, we see this as a first step in improving the campus climate at Purdue, particularly for Black Boilermakers. 

By Ajay Shah and Vasundhara Kaul (Public Relations Committee, PGSG)