About BEI

The Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion (BEI) team has four goals:

1. To embed diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) into everything we do at JMHC.
2. Build capacity, commitment, and confidence around DEIB-issues.
3. Connect communities and create collaboration between students, faculty, staff, and JMHC alumni.
4. Foster an inclusive living-learning-working climate in which everyone belongs and receives what they need to thrive and succeed

The BEI unit partners with all other units and campus collaborators to create a living-learning experience that is not only tolerant or appreciative of difference, but also understands the deep structural inequities that produce differentiated experiences for students of color, international students, queer/trans students, and disabled students. A lot of our efforts are directed towards conducting workshops, panel discussions, film-screenings, reading groups, mentoring programs – open to students, staff, faculty, and community members – that are meant to educate and equip us to have meaningful and effective conversations about race, bias, equity, inclusion, and social justice.

Through our programs, we seek to cultivate World Readiness, which is a more expansive idea than just “work-readiness.” World Readiness means being able to live authentically in diverse communities, work inclusively, interculturally, and ethically with people across differences, and in global contexts. It means knowing how to advocate for oneself and others in professional and personal contexts so that we can imagine and create a better world for all of us. This, as you well know, requires collaboration – for all of us to come together – among students from across all disciplines, staff, and faculty to think about what that means for our college, for our university, and for our lives and futures outside of Purdue.

We also look to match our advocacy programing with efforts geared towards solidarity building. It is crucial, we believe, that those from underrepresented, underserved, and marginalized groups create networks of support and solidarity with each other as a way to find a collective voice to articulate their experience and effect change. We envisage the John Martinson Honors College as a vibrant node in the ecology of the university and the cities of Lafayette and West Lafayette. Through our programs and events, we seek to encourage students, faculty and staff to engage with the social and political events around us, to understand them in an environment that is critical without being judgmental, to create a culture of creative collaboration, where speaking up and out for issues of equality and social justice is seen as the way forward and extends to life beyond the university.