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Dear Colleagues:

Provost McLaughlin and I are excited to co-chair the Institute’s newly formed Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Leadership Team, part of Georgia Tech’s new approach to diversity and inclusion. Over the last several weeks, we have spent time with various members of our community, including the Underrepresented Groups in Education Forum; the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council; as well as several meetings with faculty, staff, administrators; and student groups.

Before we chart the path forward, we need to pause for a moment and celebrate the progress we have made as a community. We want to celebrate Vice President Archie Ervin’s 13 years of service to Georgia Tech and thank him for his tireless work as he approaches retirement at the end of this year. So many good things have happened over the years because of his leadership and the tremendous work of dedicated faculty and staff in the Institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) unit and within the Schools and Colleges, Enrollment Management, undergraduate and graduate admissions, and many other units on campus. We have a strong foundation, and we want to achieve much more together.

Based on previous work and initiatives, we now have a thoughtful roadmap laid out in the Institute’s DEI plan and our overall strategic plan. The forthcoming changes will ensure our goals are fully realized. We will be focused on outcomes and have identified several that will drive our efforts to expand access and thrive on diversity.

Those outcomes include: creating an inclusive community by fostering a sense of belonging; closing gaps in student time to degree, progression, and graduation; closing gaps in faculty and staff hiring, career progression, and retention; innovating in our teaching and scholarship; and gathering data to measure our progress in all these outcome areas. We will make organizational changes by the early part of the spring semester that will shift our diversity and inclusion experts closest to the programmatic work, allowing for the greatest impact and shared responsibility.

We thank each member of this community who has been part of these discussions thus far, including the members of the DEI Council. That feedback has been invaluable to us. This is a big change for Georgia Tech, and we are committed to full transparency and open dialogue as the new strategic leadership team comes together and the work continues.

All the best,

Dr. Shantay N. Bolton
Executive Vice President for Administration and Finance
Chief Business Officer

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