CLS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Diversity Statement for the College of Letters and Science

As the largest center for education and research at Montana State University, the College of Letters and Science knows diversity is our strength. We are proud to enact our land-grant mandate to welcome all students, staff, and faculty, with a commitment to support people of color and others who have been historically underserved. Montana State University is located on the original homelands of Native peoples. We commit to acknowledging this rich history, learning from the past, and being good stewards for the future.  We commit to caring for and nurturing the human, economic, physical, and environmental resources entrusted to us.We respect and celebrate the diverse dimensions of people’s identities in order to best achieve an inclusive environment of excellence in learning, teaching, and research. 

 

Who are we?

Find out who is on the CLS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.

 

CLS Initiatives

Learn about what we are working on and what we are working towards.

 

Resources

Find resources that will help you learn more about DEI in general and on the MSU campus.

DEI Works

Read about the people working for, the research about, and the events celebrating DEI work in CLS.

Faculty Spotlight

            

This month we spotlight Cody Warner and Kate Kithil who were awarded the College of Letters and Science Outstanding Teaching award for Teaching Appoaches that Enhance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Cody Warner is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology. He joined MSU in 2013 after completing his PhD in Sociology from the Pennsylvania State University. Cody grew up in a small ranching community in Northwestern Wyoming and started college with very little background knowledge about the field of Sociology. This is similar to many of his students, and he gets a lot of joy from helping students develop their critical perspective through Sociology. As a scholar, Cody researches the social consequences of mass incarceration, and he teaches courses on crime and the criminal justice system, including Sociology of Corrections, Crime & Inequality, and Communities & Crime. He was fortunate to receive a DEI grant in 2021 to integrate the work and perspectives of BIPOC scholars in my Fall 2021 offering of Crime & Inequality.

The United States is the world leader in incarceration, and the American criminal justice system both reflects and creates social inequalities. The burden of criminal justice contact has fallen disproportionately on minority and disadvantaged communities. These same communities have suffered generations of systematic and structural racism, community disinvestment, and urban decay. For me it is pivotal that my students see connections between explicit processes like redlining and contemporary patterns of concentrated disadvantage, crime, and punishment. As a result, issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion are central to my teaching. To learn about American corrections is to learn about past practices of exclusion and inequality. This means that principles of DEI are essential in moving towards a more humane and just criminal justice system.

Do you have any recommended books/resources to help others that are learning about DEI?

I haven’t read widely enough to recommend books related specifically to DEI, but I can recommend two books I’ve read in recent years that have really stuck with me. The first, about housing, is Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The second, about incarceration and what comes next, is Reuben Miller’s Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.

Kate Kithil is a German Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (MLL) and president of the Montana Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG). At MSU German and MLL in general, our work encourages students to become global citizens by helping them view the world through different lenses and build connections to speakers of other languages both within our Bozeman community and also beyond Montana. To accomplish this, we integrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into our teaching regularly with units on a variety of topics. In the past year, for example, our German students have learned about gender-inclusive language in German. But they have also discussed the meaning of “home and landscape” in their lives and then listened to members of the Crow Nation share their impressions on the topic. They have toured the American Indian Hall and taken a trip to Yellowstone with a German photographer while hearing about both places' significance from a fellow MSU Crow student. They have read, watched, and discussed poetry, film, and texts from Afro-German artists. Furthermore, they contemplated environmental issues because these, too, are closely tied to the DEI framework (See UN Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals). In MSU German and MLL courses, we teach students that they can use their new language to learn about the world from the perspectives of people who live in other places but also that breaking down boundaries does not just happen overseas. Rather, it happens in our state, in our city, and on our campus as well.

Do you have any recommended books/resources to help others that are learning about DEI?

One resource we use is Manuela Wagner and Fabiana Cardetti’s Teaching Intercultural Citizenship Across the Curriculum which emphasizes the need for thinking about “culture” as a framework and creating real-life units where students take action.

Another resource we use is the Learning for Justice website, which helps teachers integrate Social Justice Standards into our units (See https://www.learningforjustice.org/frameworks/social-justice-standards).

Have a comment or suggestion or just want to learn more? Contact the CLS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee at [email protected] or use the form below.

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