Building sustainable diversity in higher education isnt just the right thing to do—it is an imperative for institutional excellence and for a pluralistic society that works.

In Diversitys Promise for Higher Education, author Daryl G. Smith proposes clear and realistic practices to help institutions identify diversity as a strategic imperative for excellence and pursue diversity efforts that are inclusive of the varied issues on campuses—without losing focus on the critical unfinished business of the past.

To become more relevant while remaining true to their core missions, colleges and universities must continue to frame diversity as central to institutional excellence. Smith suggests that seeing diversity as an imperative for an institutions mission, and not just as a value, is the necessary lever for real institutional change. Furthermore, achieving excellence in a diverse society requires increasing institutional capacity for diversity—working to understand how diversity is tied to better leadership, positive change, research in virtually every field, student success, accountability, and more equitable hiring practices.

In this edition, Smith emphasizes a transdisciplinary approach to the topic of diversity. Drawing on fifty years of diversity studies, this fourth edition engages with how the environment has transformed for diversity work since the third edition appeared in 2020. It
• addresses the changed landscape in which DEI work has been politicized both on and off campus;
• provides examples and language to suggest ways to articulate the centrality of diversity to mission and excellence;
• emphasizes the link between healthy democracies and higher educations mission in light of the current global and domestic challenges to democracy;
• highlights the need to focus on the conditions for developing healthy communities where dialogue, difference, and learning can take place;
• examines the current climate of campus protests and the implications for free speech and academic freedom; and
• reemphasizes the complexity of identity—and explains how to attend to the growing kinds of identities relevant to diversity, equity, and inclusion while not overshadowing the unfinished business of race, class, and gender.

Daryl G. Smith is a senior research fellow and professor emerita of education and psychology at Claremont Graduate University. She is a coauthor of Making a Real Difference with Diversity: A Guide to Institutional Change and Achieving Faculty Diversity: Debunking the Myths, and the editor of Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education: Emerging Perspectives on Institutional Transformation.

Preface: The Promise of Diversity Is Excellence
Acknowledgments
Part I: The Diversity Imperative
1. The National and Global Context for Diversity in Higher Education
2. The Role of Identity in Diversity
Part II: Reframing Diversity
3. A Diversity Framework for Higher Education: An Imperative for Excellence
4. The Past Fifty Years
Part III: Building Capacity by Interrupting the Usual
5. Identifying and Retaining Talent
6. Working with and across Differences: Intergroup Relations, Identity, and Healthy Communities
7. Student Learning and Success
Part IV: What Will It Take?
8. Monitoring Institutional Progress on Diversity
9. Making Diversity Work: Recommendations and Conclusions
References
Index

Building sustainable diversity in higher education isnt just the right thing to do-it is an imperative for institutional excellence and for a pluralistic society that works.

The book is a must-read for anyone working in higher education but more specifically for individuals who are in formal leadership positions at institutions where diversity goals and values are often challenged, where strategic plans and strategies are developed and implemented, and where accountability, climate, and equity are monitored for meaningful structural change. This book offers a deep, broad, and forward-looking approach to making Diversitys Promise for Higher Education a closer, rather than a distant reality.

— Review of Higher Education

Daryl Smith reminds us in this update of her seminal work on Diversitys Promise that diversity, equity, and inclusion work, does not diminish, but contributes to excellence, and to a healthy democracy.

— Paulette Granberry Russell, National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education

With this crucial update, Smith gives us something higher ed leaders and rank-and-file faculty urgently need: a fresh and irrefutable narrative not just in diversitys defense, but one that outflanks the offense.

— Kiernan Mathews, Ivy+ Faculty Advancement Network

With increasing calls for campuses to maintain neutrality and polarization regarding issues of diversity, Daryl G. Smith reminds us of the imperative to create campus environments that serve all our students. Years of diversity initiatives have hardly moved the needle towards more pluralistic campus environments. An excellent resource for helping us center our practice in pluralism.

— Susan Borrego, CSU Stanislaus

This new edition of a seminal text is a gift to diversity scholars and practitioners. In an evolving national and global context, when the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion are being questioned, the authors research offers timely insights into diversity and excellence and the conditions that enable the greatest potential for their transformative impact in higher education.

— Taffye Benson Clayton, Auburn University