An exciting challenge

There would be something pretentious in saying that BUas is already a full diverse and inclusive community. It would be opportunistic even, if we would be claiming that BUas would be "one-hundred percent D&I-certified”. I don’t mean this as a cynical remark: search LinkedIn and you’ll find courses certifying you as ‘D&I-proof’. Although I support all initiatives advancing what D&I entails in practice, or increase awareness thereof, I’m wary about D&I being marketed or instrumentalized. So, when I’m saying that D&I is at the core of BUas, I do not mean that we are ‘certifiably‘ diverse and inclusive. I dó mean that BUas indeed has a diverse community and has long since recognized the importance of cross-cultural understanding, co-creation and social innovation. Although these themes don’t fully fathom what D&I envelops, they do originate from the very tradition that today’s societal debate on diversity and inclusion originates from: how can we improve society? We do not claim to have all the answers. And no, we do not believe we’re perfect ourselves. Instead, we recognize the issues, and we take them seriously. But yes: we do believe that a diverse and inclusive community is prerequisite to use each other’s strengths, combining them, and experimenting together, to help solve the challenges of our society. Social equity being at the heart of this. Also, we believe it’s vital for meeting the changing needs of the industries we serve. This is how D&I is at the core BUas. And how it has informed our strategy.

Sander van Breugel is Human Resource Advisor at Breda University of Applied Sciences, and he is involved in the development of the D&I strategy.

D&I-plan

This is not a ‘paper tiger’: in February ’22 our Executive Board formalized BUas’ D&I-plan by which it committed itself to achieving specific goals and allocating resources to achieve those. Thereby, a structural framework was achieved that is able to address D&I integrally to all relevant areas (education, research and internal organization) and shareholders (students, employees and the local community). This means our D&I-team is an active collaboration with our colleagues concerned with Humane Resource, Sustainable Development Goals, internationalization, student wellbeing, ethics and community building: sharing goals, knowledge and relations and aligning activities to contribute to BUas’ strategic mission: ‘to empower young professionals on their journey to shape a better world’.

A structural framework was achieved that is able to address D&I integrally to all relevant areas and shareholders.

The concrete commitments in our D&I-plan, besides allocating resources to achieve them, are to develop a comprehensive D&I policy and connect, share and enrich internal policies and initiatives; to develop a D&I monitor and internal audits, review our employee recruitment processes and initiate further research into our state-of-affairs and to integrate D&I training for management, staff and students. But our ambitions reach beyond that. We are currently developing a BUas-wide educational curriculum on ethics and D&I, we want to integrate D&I integrally in our research teams, portfolios and partnerships as well as strengthen our research itself by integrating the ethical perspective that D&I requires of us. Most generally put: we have a structure in place to promote and enhance D&I as a matter of social safety and inclusion.

Agenda

So, we have the will, the plan, the structure and the means, but what are we going to do? One thing that is high on our agenda is to regularly organize dialogue-sessions on specific topics with students and colleagues, sometimes with guest-experts. Last March, for example, Assistant Professor Dr. Catherine Robb was interviewed, in a College Tour setting, by students and employees on how to deal with bias. Such dialogues help raise awareness and critical understanding of different viewpoints. We’re also supporting a research project into the experienced inclusion within BUas, looking to learn from its results and integrate those in a more elaborate self-scan. We’ll develop workshops and training for both students and employees and seek to improve our processes and procedures. It’s an exciting challenge: it’s a complex topic and there are lots of areas to address. But we’re ready for it and anxious to start the work, together with our students and employees.