Video 6:         Social Sciences
                     Diversity at UMUC
Speaker:         Blair Hayes, PhD
                     Adjunct Assistant Professor, UMUC
                     Ombudsman and Vice President of Diversity Programs, UMUC

In the diversity office, we support diversity and cultural awareness for staff, students, and faculty. So we support all programs that are designed to raise the awareness of all individuals of the UMUC community. That includes training programs that we have in place that’s specifically around different diversity categories. We also have mandatory trainings such as sexual harassment training to let staff and students know what’s OK, what’s not OK, and protect them from doing things that might cross the line. Additionally, we support the accessibility services office, and that office provides accommodations and assistive technologies for any staff, students, or faculty who might need them. Additionally, we develop training programs as needed to support ad hoc issues that might arise, so whatever that might be will come through the diversity office.

My background in psychology and social organizational psychology specifically looks at the group dynamics and the way that people interact and behave with one another. My interest in diversity is added to that because it really talks about how the differences that we all bring to the table impact the way we experience work and the way we respond to stimuli in our environment around us. And so it’s always been interesting for me to look at what happens when people come together and form new groups and leave groups and come to new groups, and so that is what diversity is. It is the groups that are being impacted by the amount of difference or the amount of sameness as it were that might be within a group structure. And so psychology is just so interesting because it’s really the study of people.

Diversity is important is because we can benefit from the different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that everyone brings to the table. And so we really try to make sure that we’re capitalizing on all those unique skill sets that people have. We don’t want to have a group of people who all think the same, act the same, and behave the same because that’s just not a fun place to work. And so we figure that that difference and that heterogeneity becomes part of the UMUC community makes us all better prepared to respond to problems that might arise and issues that might arise as well. So this is not true only at UMUC but across the corporate and academic and public landscapes, and so we see that a lot where people are trying to extend their markets, so you want to market to people and people want to work at places that reflect who they are. And so if we have a diverse workforce, we might get more diverse students, and we might get more diverse skill sets that are part of the UMUC community.

We try to provide our students with a lot of opportunities to participate in our diversity programs. We actually have three diversity courses: Diversity Awareness, Race and Ethnic Relations, and Minorities in the United States that students can participate in as part of their ongoing curriculum. Additionally, they are allowed to participate in all—and are invited to participate in all of our diversity programs, the monthly cultural heritage month celebrations that we provide, and they’re also recorded so that they can access the recordings at a later date if they’re interested in learning more about a particular topic.