Introduction

In March 2006, President Alan B. Donovan charged the Office of Equity and Inclusion to create the College’s Strategic Action Plan on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. This charge provided the College with the opportunity for engagement on the part of its constituency groups in creating the College we aim to have in five years.

The Office of Equity and Inclusion invited the members of the President’s Cabinet to work with their divisions in selecting a specific number of individuals to represent each division - the constituency groups - on the Strategic Action Plan’s Team. From August 2006, to the present, the Director of the Office of Equity and Inclusion has been working with the Team in creating the Plan.

The SUNY College at Oneonta’s core values have long recognized academic excellence in teaching, advisement, and scholarship; civility and respect among the citizens of the College; and the cultivations of a campus environment rich in opportunities for participation, personal challenge, and service. The rationale for the College’s commitment toward creating an inclusive campus community transcends the pressing and pragmatic pronouncements based on demographic trends and projections for the first half of the 21st century. The SUNY College at Oneonta aspires toward a campus community where diversity is a valued attribute from which each individual and all constituent groups contribute and from which all will benefit. It is the richness in variation that opens the full potential expressed by the diversity that each person brings to our working, living, and learning environments. Diversity at the College is an inclusive value that encompasses race and ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity and gender expression, age, ability, socio-economic status, and other aspects of identity. We affirm that our many differences are also our greatest strengths as a community.

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