DAPS - Centrality in Planning

Key Indicator D1. Centrality of diversity in planning processes and mission statements

Rationale and Goals:
The documents created through planning processes and the construction of mission statements purport to show us the central concerns of the people who participate in these exercises. When these documents are public, or when they guide the writing of public statements, they become an important part of the public face of an institution. Increasingly, this public face is shown and seen on an institution’s website. By browsing a university’s website, interested persons can form an impression of the extent to which that university is attuned to particular issues. Our goal was to review planning and mission statements from a variety of Portland State units; evaluate the centrality of diversity concerns in those documents; and evaluate Portland State’s web-based “public face” about diversity. We focused on prospective students and prospective employees as two major “publics” of special interest.

Where the data come from:
The data for this indicator consists of mission and planning statements published by the institution, its eight major colleges and schools, and selected other units. We reviewed statements from two sources. First, we reviewed Portland State’s “Departmental Profiles” website, which was constructed to track ongoing assessment efforts. That site includes mission and planning statements for many units, especially the academic units, on campus. It is publicly available but is basically an internally oriented site. Second, we reviewed the university website, pulling a variety of documents from the units we reviewed. Our goal was to review the pages that prospective students or prospective employees would be most likely to review; these selections were, of course, subjective, but many of them made clear sense. The review was done independently by two members of the OPDI staff who then compared notes. There was a high degree of correspondence in the impressions of the two reviewers.

The limitations of the data:
It was originally our intention to construct a rating scale, but we abandoned the idea when it became clear that the sites fell into only two categories. The conclusion we draw from our review is general and holistic, and any attempt to quantify our observations would be inappropriate.

What the data tell us:
There were basically two kinds of sites—exemplary ones and ones that were characterized by what we called “missed opportunities.” As long-time Portland State employees, with inside knowledge of various diversity efforts on campus, we recognized references to diversity in almost all of the web pages we reviewed. The language used on most of the web pages, however, was oblique, and we feel that external readers would not see the focus on diversity that we were able to pick up. In a few cases, diversity was submerged into internationalization. On the whole, the institutional website does very little to welcome people from underrepresented groups. The OPDI website certainly does, but sequestering our diversity message there does not reflect the wide commitment across campus to diversity issues.

We reviewed three websites that we deemed exemplary:

• School of Social Work (start at http://www.ssw.pdx.edu/ and browse to “About Us” and elsewhere)
• Graduate School of Education (start at http://www.pdx.edu/education/ and browse to “About GSE” and elsewhere)
• Dean of Students Office (start at http://www.pdx.edu/dos/ and browse to “DOS Mission and Values Statement”)

Using the information:
A review of the exemplary websites listed above may suggest ways in which other colleges and offices can express a commitment to diversity through their websites.

Research and writing:
Documents were collected by A.J. Arriola; the document review was done by A.J. Arriola and Martha Balshem; this report was written by Martha Balshem. Please e-mail comments to diversity@pdx.edu