24.3% African American, 14.1% Asian, and 29.1% Hispanic, with 200+ languages spoken, makes New York the ground zero for addressing the challenges of creating an inclusive city.
Columbia Business School proudly has adopted the strengths of its host city. The school is working on the weaknesses as well by focusing on three areas:
1) Build a Diverse Community
To encourage and support African American and Hispanic students to consider and onboard them to Columbia programs, the team has taken extra steps in facilitating meetings with alumni from the African American Alumni and Hispanic Alumni Associations, who had traversed similar challenges. Additionally, the school has developed strategies to improve the diversity of faculty and professors under the umbrella of popular programs, including MBA, EMBA, MS, and Ph.D.
2) Curriculum and Classroom Inclusion
Auditing Caseworks: With unconscious bias reinforced with words and phrases that assume lesser of the racial minority, the school has partnered with the Samberg Center for Teaching Excellence and Columbia Caseworks to review and audit the languages used in case studies and coursework.
Covering underrepresented businesses: By representing a wider pool of businesses and cases beyond the Silicon Valley Tech companies and New York City bulge bracket banks, the school is widening the reach of inspirational businesses started by minority business owners and underrepresented voices.
Gender Pronouns: To give students the freedom to choose their pronouns, Columbia University became the first school to introduce a tool to register their gender pronouns. The school also established a Dean Summer Fellows program to support students and help them find internship opportunities in a challenging Summer job market.
3) Inclusive Culture
By developing a feedback process to continuously measure the progress in creating an inclusive culture at Columbia and actively seeking members who can challenge traditional beliefs, debate, and persuade the community to new norms, the school is building a culture that is founded on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
