The story and the history of UMBC is that of a community that, through the commitment and hard work of our faculty, staff and students, has dedicated itself to creating a new model of the public research university grounded in the principle of inclusive excellence. UMBC rightly has established a national reputation for the diversity of our student body and our commitment to educating and supporting students from all backgrounds. While we have made significant progress, we continue to deepen and broaden our efforts to recruit and retain a diverse and inclusively excellent faculty.
There are multiple reasons for this imperative, each one of which is sufficiently compelling in its own right. UMBC must recruit and sustain a professoriate that reflects inclusive excellence across dimensions of difference if it is to achieve its mission and enable the University, USM, and Maryland to benefit from and collaborate with the brightest minds in the world. The vibrancy of the intellectual and social life of the UMBC community is enriched when minds from diverse backgrounds engage one another in respectful, equitable, and insightful ways.
How we address equity, inclusion, and excellence today shapes both our collective identity and our vision for UMBC’s future. Our collective acknowledgment of this imperative is reflected in our ongoing institutional commitment to advancing inclusive excellence through faculty diversification.
Put simply: UMBC cannot achieve it’s full potential as a leading public research university without the benefit of a full spectrum of perspectives that are diverse, equitable, and rooted in inclusive excellence, driving our educational mission, research, scholarship, creative activity and civic engagement. Nor can we expect to fulfill our promise and responsibility to be a university that is engaged in understanding, and finding solutions for, the most important local and global challenges we face today.