I am committed to keeping the values of equity and inclusion top priorities of the LBJ School. Together with maximizing society's well-being, liberty and security, these values embody the very mission of President Johnson's life work — and the tireless work of students, alumni, faculty and staff.
Operationalizing this commitment within the LBJ School will require a careful focus on our composition, our culture and our curriculum.
Our current composition does not adequately represent the diverse community we are dedicated to serving as a public university through our teaching, research and service. This creates barriers to learning and professional development for some of our students. Diversity broadens the scope of our intellectual inquiry and extends the breadth and nature of our civic and service engagement to our broader community. This is why I will seek to integrate new procedures and strategies into our approach to recruiting students, faculty and staff who will improve the representation of traditionally underrepresented individuals in our school. I will measure our success by how well we increase representation among our students, faculty and staff and school leadership.
Our culture is shaped by values and principles that govern how we treat each other. Our LBJ community is composed of individuals with vastly different life experiences and group identities. Some have experienced or witnessed discrimination, poverty and other forms of marginalization. Some of us struggle to have these injustices and conditions recognized and remedied not only in the world at large, but also within our LBJ community. This struggle may extend into our classrooms, our study groups, our conversations with one another, our membership practices and our broader policies. As we come together as one learning community, we must all navigate sensitive and difficult conversations about what is just and right. Our ability to support each other, learn from each other and collaborate during our LBJ journey depends critically upon affording one another respect and focusing on our common humanity while potentially disagreeing on deeply important matters. I will measure our success not by the absence of difficult conversations but by our ability to have such conversations in a manner that respects one another and maintains the integrity of our community.
Our curriculum is designed to give students the skills, methods and knowledge not only to become accomplished policy analysts but also to lead public, private sector and nonprofit organizations. The policies and organizations we study may be designed to exacerbate, passively enable or actively reduce discrimination and inequality. Historically, our curriculum has not adequately enabled our students to recognize how what they are learning can be used to identify, measure the persistence of and reduce discrimination and inequality. We have recently added this renewed focus to our policy development curriculum, and I will also encourage our faculty to create more of these opportunities as they design our core and elective courses. My hope is that our faculty’s choice of readings, problem sets, case studies, writing assignments, clients and topics for policy research projects will better equip our students to identify, measure and reduce discrimination and inequality. I will measure our success by the extent to which the contents of our courses evolve to focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.
I invite the entire LBJ community to engage in fostering more diversity, equity and inclusion within our school and our society. Thank you for joining me in this commitment.
Warm regards,
JR DeShazo
Dean