The College of HEST at NMSU advocates for our diverse students, staff, faculty, and visitors. We recognize intersecting systemic barriers including but not limited to the following 15 Office of Institutional Equity (OIE)-recognized categories: age, ancestry, color, disability, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, retaliation, serious medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, spousal affiliation, or protected veteran status. We aggressively oppose all types of prejudice, injustice, and discrimination, including but not limited to the fifteen OIE-recognized categories. By following the measures listed below, we aim to improve our awareness of and recognition of bias and discrimination.

As a Hispanic-Serving and Minority-Serving Institution located in the Borderlands we are committed to providing equitable outcomes and enacting culturally relevant experiences for our NMSU community. We value action and inclusion through:

• Demonstration of cultural humility and sensitivity
• Engagement and collaboration with our local community
• Culturally- and linguistically sustaining pedagogy
• Equity-minded leadership and accountability practices for transformational change
• Acknowledgement and validation of first-generation and non-traditional students’ lived experiences, through promoting students’ sense of belonging toward academic success
• Compositional diversity of faculty, staff, administration, and students
• Awareness of critical analysis of historical and collective traumas and the persistence of structural racism and oppression
• Recognition of existing funds of knowledge and lived expertise of Black, Indigenous, and Students and Faculty of Color, LGBT+ students and faculty, first generation and nontraditional students and faculty, and those with diverse identities that promote a vibrant campus climate and learning environment

We actively resist all forms of prejudice, oppression, and discrimination related to but not limited to the 15 OIE-recognized categories, neurological diversity, language diversity, income status, gender expression, and political affiliation. We reject aggression, microaggressions, and systems that perpetuate the status quo, normative behaviors, and institutional forms of racism.

We will work towards continually deepening our understanding of and recognizing examples of prejudice and discrimination by taking the actions below. We aim to set priorities and act in five overlapping areas:

1. Student Access and Success

• Embrace best practices that promote social mobility of students through social equity in undergraduate and graduate programs and degrees

2. Campus Climate and College of HEST Culture

• Create a campus community that is free from discrimination and systemic and cultural barriers to academic and professional success for all students, faculty, staff, and administrators
• Establish a college Ombudsperson office to facilitate and maintain the College of HEST as a safe place to learn, work, and visit for all persons and to resolve difficult issues we experience in and beyond the College
• Recognize publicly all employees for their years of service to the college, inclusive of regularized and non-regularized employees

3. Curricula, Scholarship, and Creative Activities

• Conduct, promote, and disseminate research and other creative activities that enhance collective understanding of the structural and cultural legacies operating at NMSU
• Develop capacities to transform and build the College of HEST on the principles and values of excellence, diversity, equity, and inclusive syllabi and pedagogical practices that promote scholarship from seminal, contemporary, and decolonized sources

4. Structural Diversity of Faculty, Staff, Administrators, and Guests

• Broaden/expand recruitment and retention of underrepresented students, faculty, staff, and administrators to oppose systematic racism and other interlocking systems of inequalities.
• Create diversity, equity, and inclusion award to recognize and reward faculty and staff efforts to promote DEI in the college, university, and community to oppose the systematic racism and other interlocking systems of inequalities
• Make accessible representational mentorship for Black, Indigenous, Student and Faculty of Color

5. Community Partnerships

• Identify existing equity opportunities in community partnerships and relationships with community actors and make recommendations to address these opportunities to the Dean on an ongoing basis
• Expand community partnerships, particularly with women’s and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) organizations, to transform the social distance between HEST and the greater southern New Mexico community

HEST is committed to taking steps toward tangible change while, at the same time, implementing longer-term strategies to change and transform policies and practices that are currently the foundation of institutional and systemic racism and other interlocking systems of inequalities.