Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

In the 2026/2027 school year, the DEI Committee organized a tour of the September 11th Museum in effort to span generations in learning about this significant event in the life of New Yorkers. The committee partnered with the student group Latines in Tech to produce a Community Altar for Día de Muertos.  The committee plans to have activities for Diwali and Black History Month, as well as decorations for days of cultural significance, including Passover (completed), Christmas, Hanukkah, and Lunar New Year. Other activities are forthcoming.

In the 2025/2026 school year, the DEI committee organized the talk W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits with Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste in connection with the Pratt Manhattan Gallery on 14th Street show, In Our Time: Eleven Artists + W.E.B. Du Bois. They also organized a Group Tour of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the 2026 Whitney Biennial. They organized decorations and snacks for days of cultural significance, including Diwali and Lunar New Year, as well as decorations for Ramadan, Christmas and Hanukkah and Passover.

In the 2024/2025 school year, the DEI committee hosted a faculty workshop “Working with Neurodiverse Students in Graduate School” featuring leading experts on this topic. For students, the school expanded its activities around events with cultural significance, including a photo booth for Diwali and dumplings for Lunar New Year. The school also supported the use of Namecoach in the community through communications to the student and faculty about its availability.

In 2023/2024 school year, the DEI committee hosted several events to the community, including field trips to engage the city and talks (see event #1, #2, #3), and connected the annual Ethics & Technology forum with the topic of AI and DEI. We also co-sponsored “Fridays in May: QBIPOC Peer-Networking Program,” which is part of Prof. Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz’s DEI Faculty Fellowship.

In fall 2022, SI DEI organized a workshop for students around addressing conflict in the workplace (see flier) and a follow-up workshop in spring 2023 (see flier).  A workshop for faculty was held in March 2023 around making updates to assignments and other parts of syllabi to align them with the MSLIS core curriculum learning outcomes that made DEI learning outcomes in core courses more explicit (see flier). 

In fall 2021, SI DEI held an Open Forum on DEI to solicit needs and programming ideas from the community (see flier).  In spring 2022, SI DEI held four workshops or field trips on DEI topics for students (see event #1, #2, #3, #4) as well as a faculty workshop on next steps for incorporating DEI into curriculum and teaching (see flier).

In fall 2020, the School of Information Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee was established that works to move forward DEI initiatives from the Strategic Plan. In spring 2021, SI DEI hosted a 3-part speaker series for students on DEI topics titled “Breaking Barriers” (see event #1, #2, #3), as well as the “Decolonizing the Curriculum” event for SI faculty, which began conversations among faculty around indigenous knowledges in the curriculum.

In fall 2019, the School of Information Curriculum Committee introduced the “DEI Addendum” that requires that proposers of new or reviewed courses consider how DEI is expressed in course proposals. In December 2019, the School approved its five year Strategic Plan (2019–2024), which include seven DEI initiatives that tie-into the Institute-wide DEI plan.

Held the “Diversifying the Curriculum Event” which invited leaders from campus and from the wider information field to campus to give talks and engage the faculty and staff in activities around identity, expressing DEI in syllabi, DEI teaching practices at other iSchools, and library resources around diversifying information science.

Faculty and staff training workshop in spring 2018 that invited Dialogues on Diversity to campus to provide implicit bias education