Executive Vice Chancellor – Commitment to Diversity

Diversity is a defining feature of the State of California, and is a source of innovative ideas, creative accomplishments, and a variety of values and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and life experiences. The University of California strives to reflect this diversity in its students, faculty and staff. Achieving such diversity is a high institutional priority, and is integral to UC San Diego’s achievement of academic excellence.

Diversity has an educational, social, economic, political and ethical value for our university. It enriches the ability of UC San Diego to accomplish its academic mission by broadening and deepening the educational experience through interactions of students and faculty from multiple backgrounds and perspectives. Diversification offers social participation and mutual understanding to all Californians regardless of their heritage, orientation or situation. It provides equality of access and opportunity so that every segment of society can contribute to and benefit from our economic future. It enlightens and empowers constituencies of all types to engage in our democracy in an increasingly multicultural state, where voters and political leaders are likely to be more supportive of an inclusive, representative, and heterogeneous university. Finally, embracing faculty, students, and staff from all social sectors constitutes a moral obligation in a nation with a long history of unequal treatment of disadvantaged groups. For all these reasons and more, UC San Diego must continue and strengthen its commitment to diversity.

Through the campus Principles of Community, we strive to create a climate of respect, fairness, cooperation and professionalism and to promote innovation and leadership by utilizing the talents and abilities of all. In creating an environment of equity for all, a particular effort is made to remove any barriers which hinder equal opportunity in employment, particularly for those groups who historically have often experienced discrimination in the area of employment.

Academic Affairs values diversity, equity, and inclusion as essential ingredients of academic excellence in higher education, and we have established the office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (VC-EDI) to actively advance these values as an institutional priority.