Dean Jeff Milem (center) at the White House
Jeff Milem, Dean and Professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, was an invited panelist for the White House Convening on Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education held on Friday, November 18. This event connected the work from President and Mrs. Obama’s January 2014 College Opportunity Summit, December 2014 College Opportunity Day of Action, and the important efforts underway nationwide to promote greater diversity and inclusion.
“This meeting, organized by President Obama’s domestic policy advisors and the Secretary and Undersecretary of Education, brought together policy makers, campus leaders, and scholars to ensure that discussions of campus diversity and inclusion consider how we admit and enroll diverse student bodies as well as to understand what we need to do to have all students feel safe, supported, and valued on our campuses so that they can thrive,” says Dean Milem. “As an educational scholar who has spent my entire career studying these issues, I was deeply honored to have the opportunity to share my insights.”
Milem presented research that helped provide an empirically supported framework to examine a campus’s racial climate. In that framework, climate is not only limited to merely numbers (compositional diversity) or perceptions and attitudes (the psychological climate), but also includes the institution’s structure and history as well as people’s interactions across differences. The framework assumes that students are educated in racial contexts that vary from campus to campus, and the variations in climate that occur are shaped by a range of external and internal forces.
Milem summed up his comments, “Clearly, educational institutions and those of us who work within them must play a much more active role in addressing the quality of education delivered for an increasingly diverse nation and documenting the on-going power of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation in shaping life chances in our society.”
Before becoming Dean of the Gevirtz School, Milem previously served as the Ernest W. McFarland Distinguished Professor in Leadership for Education Policy and Reform in the College of Education at the University of Arizona. He was also a Professor in the Center of the Study of Higher Education and Director of the Arizona Medical Education Research Initiative in the Colleges of Education and Medicine at the University of Arizona. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
Milem is a widely recognized expert in the area of racial dynamics in higher education. He is the author or co-author of seven books, 15 book chapters, and 25 articles on education issues, and has been the principal or co-principal investigator of 16 grants.