California State University (CSU): Strength, Diversity, Excellence
The CSU’s increasingly diverse team of professors, administrators and staff members works tirelessly on- and off-campus to create an unparalleled learning environment, produce cutting-edge research, and spearhead innumerable community and service-learning programs statewide. The CSU’s steadfast, ongoing commitment to academic distinction, accessibility for first-generation college students, and community engagement is incomparable. For more information about CSU commitment to diversity, please visit CSU employee diversity profile or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Definitions
Diversity Glossary
Belonging is a basic human need that is met by active acceptance and validation of a person’s lived experience, perspective, and ways of learning and understanding and includes a community of persons with shared social identities, supportive and challenging environments, and climates with high levels of encouragement.
Diversity is the presence , recognition and engagement of people of social, political and institutional identities from the wide range of human experiences, and the complex ways these identities intersect and are lived.
Equity names a process of dismantling and creating structures and practices that have intentionally or unintentionally advantaged or disadvantaged groups of people; it is a process that responds to unjust structural outcomes to create laws, policies, practices and traditions that support just outcomes for all.
Inclusion is a process and practice of active, intentional and sustained engagement of each person in an environment that values and respects their perspectives, multiple identities, experiences and contributions.
An inclusive climate is evidenced by practices, policies and traditions that include diverse people and perspectives, that intricately considers those from historically and systemically oppressed, underrepresented and underserved populations for the purpose of social justice.
Social Justice is the work to eliminate historic and systemic oppression and to build systems and cultures of human dignity where rights, accountability, equity, inclusion and access creates conditions for people and groups to realize their full potential.
*All definitions are a work in progress and will be further refined, as needed.