The University of Colorado’s Department of Anthropology fully supports campus initiatives surrounding racial, socioeconomic, sexual, and gender equity. We recognize the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and excellence to the forms of knowledge we create and to our educational mission. As a discipline historically rooted in the study of human diversity in all its dimensions, we seek to cultivate a respectful community of scholars and students whose research serves a diverse array of communities, both locally and globally. We are also a member of the American Anthropological Association and expect our departmental community to honor the AAA statement on research ethics. 

In the service of this broad mission, the Department of Anthropology is specifically committed to creating the climate, infrastructure, and leadership essential to a generous and rigorous intellectual community. We understand this commitment to exist in all our spaces of collaboration from those with our research communities in the field to those with our students in the classroom, from our informal conversations in the hall to our formal meetings and agreements. We are particularly focused on improving conditions of learning and working, finding greater gender and racial equity in hiring and promotions, and diversifying our faculty, staff, and graduate student community. Our department’s priorities and initiatives are formally founded in our shared belief that diversity and inclusion are a core feature of our program’s high national profile and research record. For a discipline that is fundamentally about the diverse range and ways of being human—culturally, geographically, physically, and temporally--diversity is fundamental to our intellectual project. If the pool of future anthropologists is narrow, then the quality of our scholarship and of our field will be equally impoverished. 

Climate: We know that open communication is essential to achieving our shared vision of an inclusive and excellent departmental community. In 2018, we convened a standing departmental Climate Committee to foster a respectful environment that addresses racial, sexual, economic, and gendered inequities and we were one of the first units on campus to systematically assess our climate.  

Faculty: We recognize that creating an inclusive and diverse department starts with the composition of our faculty. We see this as a core component of creating a sustainable climate of inclusivity in the department. We are proud of our record of hiring faculty over the past decade who have helped us achieve our goal of rostering diverse and excellent scholars in our discipline. Our hiring plans for the next five years are intended to build upon and deepen these successes through both postdoctoral fellowships and tenure-track hires. 

Undergraduate and Graduate Students: We further recognize that our discipline’s and our department’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion will be reflected in our students.  One of our main goals is therefore to welcome and nurture a diverse graduate and undergraduate student body, including students from historically marginalized groups in higher education. Our success will thus be in the composition and scholarship of the next generation of anthropologists. Toward this goal, we have implemented an exit survey to our graduating seniors to gather feedback on how we can achieve our shared goals as a community. At the graduate level, as we have sought to enrich our program, we have held listening events to discuss issues of racism, bias, and success in academia, both in general and in our own department. Our graduate students, and especially our graduate students of color, have led the way on many of these discussions. We see this work as ongoing. We commit ourselves to building a robust future anthropology through the recruitment and retention of a new, diverse student body.  

In pursuit of that promise, we are committed to admitting and nurturing a wide range of students as future scholars and colleagues. Our department’s understanding of diversity and equity is inherently expansive. We welcome students whose intellectual and personal interests intersect with the array of cultural, economic, ethnic, gendered, historical, religious, and sexual expressions that make humans fascinating. To that end, our commitment to diversity formally includes those categories, including but not limited to the United States. The world is our field, and we invite excellent students to join us in understanding it.