Our Mission:
As leaders of Design and Built Environment Schools, we seek to nurture a diverse population of emerging scholars teaching and researching the built environment to advance socio-ecological and spatial justice, equity, and inclusion.
Our Purpose:
As a community of built environment school deans, we are working together to curate a community of early career faculty from a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, with attention to BIPOC and other under-represented faculty, in order to challenge, expand, and enrich the planning, design, construction, and stewardship of the built environment. We seek to address concerns that potential faculty may not know how to access successful paths into the academy. We will change that by offering an early career path into the academy and by providing senior faculty mentoring as well as a series of two summer institutes on best practices in teaching and research respectively.
The proposed Fellowship program seeks to foster opportunities for early career academics, with attention to BIPOC and other under-represented faculty, including but not limited to junior TT faculty, lecturers, and teaching faculty in the built environment fields (architecture, landscape architecture, planning, urban design, and real estate among others) who wish to pursue a career as faculty in the academy.
We will offer Fellows the intellectual freedom to “teach and research what you are interested in, where you want to make a difference”, keeping spatial justice, public good and the ambition of addressing major societal and environmental challenges as a shared focus. We seek to nurture such freedom as integral to the development of excellent teachers and researchers with a commitment to spatial inclusion, equity and justice within an anti-racist framework.
Background:
Schools in the built environment disciplines, including, but not limited to, the disciplines and practices of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, preservation, urban design, real estate, and construction management, are committed to fostering academic and practice communities that reflect the broader diversity of our nation and our world. In this effort, we recognize the call to create and foster pipeline programs designed to increase the number of BIPOC and underrepresented minority graduate student enrollments and faculty candidates in every one of our schools and universities.
As leaders, we understand that to change, expand, and renew our communities we must come together to share resources for recruiting and developing diverse talent pools that will contribute to more just, equitable, and inclusive futures. We recognize that this work calls for the creation of new opportunities for individuals to engage in the academy and at the same time that we are responsible for stewarding and mentoring these individuals in their successful pursuit of an academic career.
We are launching a collaborative project across schools of the built environment professions and practices focused on the mentoring and stewardship of early career faculty committed to spatial justice.
Increasing diversity in ways that value and strengthen equity and inclusion in our institutions requires more than what any one school can do. We believe it takes the collective of design schools to change who we hire, and what we teach and practice. We intend to build the structures and resources to develop training and coaching opportunities in design schools tackling the challenges of centering spatial justice, equity, and inclusion in our practice and academic communities.
An important contribution is to collectively foster the mentoring of a next generation of diverse faculty into successful academic careers. Working together, we believe that through cross-institutional mentoring and stewardship of early career faculty, the initiative will expand and enrich the community of BIPOC and URM designers and scholars engaged in tenure-track faculty positions.