Let’s LEAP into the Diversity Leadership Certificate: The Rewards and Challenges of Leveraging Institutional Priorities and Sanitized Narratives

• In Event: PAD: Small Programs, Big Plans: Innovations, Collaborations and a “Diversity Leadership Certificate”

Abstract

Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), a 2005 initiative launched by the Association of America’s Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), promotes the value of a liberal education for students, especially in terms of what such an education can provide a worker in the 21st century global economy, but also in terms of skills necessary for civic engagement in a diverse democracy. In this paper, I discuss the rewards and challenges of leveraging institutional priorities and goals like LEAP to legitimize and fund innovative diversity programming like the Diversity Leadership Certificate.

Presenter

• Ellie Christine Schemenauer, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater