By Cynthia Hubert

March 26, 2024

Sacramento State planted the seeds for creating a campus committed to antiracism and inclusion more than five years ago, opening an office dedicated to that ambitious task.

Since then, the campus has watered those seeds, launching and refining programs and policies that foster a sense of inclusion and belonging.

Now it is harvest time, said Mia Settles-Tidwell, the University’s vice president for Inclusive Excellence, on Monday, March 25, at a Sac State event celebrating some of the results of those efforts.

“It’s one thing to talk about it, and another to be about it,” Settles-Tidwell said. “This campus decided to be about it.”

At the daylong showcase, students, faculty, staff and administrators shared practices that demonstrate the University’s commitment to achieving its diversity, antiracism and inclusion goals. The efforts are guided by a comprehensive campus plan created with campuswide input and released in 2021.

“This was all of our work, and we took it up as such,” Settles-Tidwell said at the well-attended event in the University Union Ballroom. “It took all of us.”

Research projects, services, programs and initiatives highlighted at the showcase included those focused on bridging the digital divide, raising cultural competency in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), elevating the legacy of Black women at Sac State, increasing academic achievement among first-generation students, and embracing Asian and Pacific Islander culture at the University.

Sacramento State President Luke Wood, the morning’s keynote speaker, told an audience of hundreds of people that inclusion and diversity programs are facing increasing scrutiny and backlash in several other states.

“We are living during one of the greatest attacks on civil rights in higher education” in recent history, he said. These include closures of Department of Equity and Inclusion offices, harsh criticism of ethnic studies programs and political outcry about discussions of racial injustice and civil rights in college classes.

The showcase’s discussions about hate, racism and social justice demonstrate that Sac State is on a much different track, Wood said.

“What is the story we want to tell about Sac State?” he asked. “We should be an ambassador to students in all of these other states” where diversity and inclusion programs are under duress, Wood said.

Sac State has work to do to achieve its lofty goals, he said.

“But despite our faults, we have much to offer on the national stage,” he said, citing the University’s status as a Hispanic Serving Institution, an ANIPISI Serving Institution, and the home of the nation’s first Black Honors College.

Two Sac State student leaders, Veronica Boulos and Isabella Jimenez, shared their experiences with the audience. They credited the University for helping them to fully embrace their ethnic backgrounds and feel less isolated.

At Sac State, “I learned to not push my culture away, and welcome it in,” said Boulos, who helped found the Arab Student Union on campus.

“It’s really important that we take these steps in higher education,” Jimenez said of the showcase. “They allow students like me, and those after me, to feel respected and represented.”