Abstract:

Because Ghent University strongly believes that consciously dealing with diversity is an enrichment to the university as a whole and to the staff and students individually, it has shown increasing attention to this topic in various ways. The unit Diversity and Gender stimulates through concrete actions, projects and policy recommendations the mutual involvement between students and staff and implements diversity in all layers of the university. One of its focal points is developing actions to improve the chances of students from certain target groups (e.g. students/staff with a disability, students with an ethnic minority background, students with an untypical educational background…).

Because of the growing number of students, the student population becomes more diverse each year. Paying attention to the individual differences between students and members of the staff demands extra care and attentiveness of everybody involved. It is therefore very important that both staff and students learn how to deal with all kinds of differences between people and that diversity is actively supported by the management.

Despite a number of structural changes, a sustainable cultural shift has not yet been achieved. The challenge is to implement change in such a way that the main culture is thoroughly influenced by diversity and gender mainstreaming. In order to create more role models for students and to raise diversity and gender awareness among members of the (academic and administrative) staff, working on an interdisciplinary level is of key importance.

In my presentation, I would like to give an overview of our best practices and discuss the challenges we’re facing. I will focus on the cooperation between the centrally organized unit Diversity and Gender and the diversity teams (based on volunteers) in the various faculties and show that this construction is a real opportunity for building an new organizational culture.
Meeting people who are working on the same topic, but probably from various angles can only be a surplus for our actions. From the audience, I hope to get feedback on the projects and actions we have developed so far and to get ideas for new ways to make diversity a real part of everyday life at university.

An overview of our projects can be found on our website: http://www.ugent.be/en/ghentuniv/diversity-and-gender

Keywords:

Diversity, gender, higher education, migration background, disability.