The School of Medicine is on a journey. Moving from excellence to eminence requires an unwavering commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, principles that must be more than promises. They must define who we are and how we engage with each other and with the community we serve. We’re grateful for the hard work of so many faculty, staff, and learners who helped craft the roadmap for our DEI journey. This journey is bold, purposefully provocative, and in alignment with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) national discourse to move us as an institution toward being an antiracist organization. This executive summary provides a broad overview of the plan and our six strategic goals.
We look forward to journeying with you.
Sheryl L. Heron, MD, MPH, FACEP
Associate Dean for Community Engagement, Equity and Inclusion
Executive Summary
Emory School of Medicine is committed to a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community where all our faculty, staff, and learners can thrive. The School of Medicine’s Office of Equity and Inclusion (OEI) was formed to lead the way in actualizing that commitment. In 2021, we engaged a broad range of stakeholders over nine months of intensive work to produce an ambitious and immediately actionable strategic plan for ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion are consistently understood, practiced, and embraced across the School of Medicine while nurturing a culture of ongoing awareness, learning, and growing. The five-year plan aligns with other Emory constituencies across the university, the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, and the School of Medicine.
The plan identifies six goals, each with implementation initiatives ranked by stakeholder teams according to the level of impact the initiative would have, the degree of urgency or time sensitivity to launch, and level of attainability/effort required. Initiatives also are keyed to the four target constituencies: learners, faculty, staff, and the School of Medicine as a whole. Carefully defined metrics for each initiative enable ongoing evaluation of effectiveness and impact. Read on to learn more about each strategic goal and planned activities.
Core Values
As one of Emory University’s nine schools, we affirm diversity, equity, inclusion, and equity-mindedness as core values. We are guided by Emory’s Institutional Statement on Diversity, which defines these values as follows:
Diversity: Individual differences (e.g., personality, prior knowledge, and life experiences) and group/social differences (e.g., race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, and ability as well as cultural, political, religious, or other affiliations).
Equity: The creation of opportunities for historically underserved populations to have equal access to and participate in educational programs that are capable of closing the achievement gaps in student success and completion.
Inclusion: The active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity—in the curriculum, in the co-curriculum, and in communities (intellectual, social, cultural, geographical) with which individuals might connect—in ways that increase awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication, and empathic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within systems and institutions.
Equity-Mindedness calls attention to patterns of inequity in outcomes for students, faculty, and staff. Practitioners of equity-mindedness are willing to take personal and institutional responsibility for the success of their students, faculty, and staff, and critically reassess their own practices. It also requires that practitioners are race-conscious and aware of the social and historical context of exclusionary practices in American Higher Education.