The principles of inclusive excellence are infused throughout the teaching, research, and service conducted in the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For several years, Fairmount College has included an advocate on every search committee for hiring new faculty. These search advocates, faculty members with expertise in hiring best practices, advise the committees on which they serve on issues ranging from generating a diverse pool of applicants to conducting fair and inclusive interviews to planning successful campus visits. Advocates, together with the dean, have designed standards to guide their work.
Fairmount College also is committed to instituting the recommendations made by the Advance Grant team, awarded $3,900,000 from the National Science Foundation to recruit more women and people of color to Wichita State's STEM fields and improve the experiences of women and faculty of color already at WSU. One of those recommendations was to create associate deans of Inclusive Excellence for each of Wichita State's undergraduate colleges. In 2022, the Fairmount College Dean’s Office created its role of Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, a half-time position reporting to the dean. The associate dean is charged with assigning search advocates and serving as an advocate on a search, working with departments to infuse more diversity within the curriculum, helping departments develop and maintain inclusive cultures, and, most importantly, helping departments and faculty with the diversity-related initiatives they are already implementing or would like to implement.
The college's Inclusive Excellence Committee members are faculty from across the college and will serve as an advisory body to guide the associate dean's work. Thus, the associate dean will prioritize the efforts faculty see as most important. This group will also create a Fairmount College Inclusive Excellence plan to guide the work of the associate dean and the committee in the years to come. The committee consists of the following faculty:
- Jason Allen, Department of English
- Michael Birzer, School of Criminal Justice
- Rocio del Aguila, Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures
- Jean Griffith, Department of English
- Charles Koeber, Department of Sociology
- Rhonda Lewis, Department of Psychology
- Jennifer Pearson, Department of Sociology
- Phillip Samuels, Elliott School of Communication
- Andrew Swindle, Department of Geology