Institutional Transformation

Building on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s seminal work in critical race theory and Estella Bensimon’s work on equity in higher education, our STRIDES model examines and devises solutions to overcome barriers to doctoral candidates’ persistence through degree completion and both their and postdoctoral scholars’ success in obtaining faculty appointments. Bonilla-Silva (1997) disputed historical approaches to defining and studying racism and its effects, challenging longstanding theories that have been popularized in mainstream social science. He theorized social arenas such as academia within a racialized social system that relies on color-evasive ideology to reify itself (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Bensimon, 2004). Bensimon developed the Equity Scorecard (formerly Diversity Scorecard) framework to determine areas where systemic organizational policies and practices act as obstacles to the success of undergraduate students who are racial and/or ethnic minorities, positing that diversity and inclusion should be measured and evaluated as a metric of institutional excellence. By adapting the Equity Scorecard framework for STRIDES, we will be able to determine where work is needed to improve policies and practices to create systemic ground-up solutions for greater inclusion of underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty.