Broadening Departmental Participation to Implement IDEAs in Yale EPS

Yale University's Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences formed the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism/Discrimination (IDEA) Committee in Fall 2019 to promote inclusion and belonging both within our department as well as the greater New Haven area. The structure of the IDEA Committee, which includes two faculty, two postdocs, two graduate students, one undergrad, and the Department Chair, has enabled the successful channeling of early-career researcher-led initiatives into formal department policy voted upon by the faculty. These include the publication of many deliverables drafted by our Unlearning Racism in the Geosciences (URGE) pod onto the EPS website, including the drafting and adoption of a fieldwork code of conduct.

In Fall 2021, the graduate and postdoctoral members of the IDEA Committee worked together to formalize a new way to broaden community participation in IDEA initiatives through the creation of IDEA Working Groups led by graduate students and postdocs. These include Disability/Mental Health/Chronic Illness, International Community/First-Gen, Fieldwork, URGE, and Womxn in EPS at Yale. All department members have been invited to join these working groups, to harness the energy of the departmental community beyond the 8 official IDEA Committee members. Some of our initiatives thus far have included the development, implementation, and discussion of a departmental climate/mental health survey; monthly group mentoring meetings for women and gender minorities, and a Women in EPS research symposium with bystander intervention training; the development of an orientation packet for international students, as well as advocacy to make graduate application fee waivers more transparent; and the creation of a questionnaire to gauge adherence to the Fieldwork Code of Conduct, as well as departmental sponsorship of Wilderness First Aid. Each working group also takes a turn hosting monthly meetings of the IDEA Reading Group to discuss recent DEI-related publications. These achievements highlight the importance of engaging broader departmental participation, particularly of early-career researchers, to enact lasting change, and we suggest that this organizational structure could be adopted by other institutions with fruitful results.