The Office of the Provost on Friday released a diversity, equity and inclusion action plan, which has been in the works since 2021, that includes new and existing actions taken by the University to address campus climate issues suggested by students, faculty and staff.

The plan, an initiative of the Provost’s office from August 2021, includes recommendations made by student, faculty and staff subgroups and comes more than two years after officials conducted a diversity climate survey in April 2022 to improve campus-wide diversity. The report includes actions the University has already taken or “plan to explore” in addressing issues relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, with notably more than half of survey respondents in 2022 reporting a negative experience on campus and LGBTQ+ respondents reporting the most “negative” identity-based treatment.

“The DEI action plan reveals that GW is well on the right track to address some of the issues of concern identified by our community and the Diversity Program Review Team,” Provost Chris Bracey said in the release.

In August 2021, Bracey said the office would conduct a yearlong comprehensive review to assess and improve campus diversity, replacing a diversity audit that former University President Thomas LeBlanc and former Provost Brian Blake initiated in January 2021 for an outside firm to conduct research in faculty composition, financial aid packages and police engagement.

In February 2022, Bracey announced the creation of the Diversity Program Review Team, a group of 26 total faculty, students and administrators tasked with creating a comprehensive review of the University’s diversity climate with plans to make recommendations to administrators on campus-wide diversity improvements. In April 2022, Bracey announced that the review team would open a climate survey for faculty and students, entering the third of the then-11 phases the review team planned to conduct.

The diversity plan states that “many” in the GW community feel the University is not responding strongly enough to its commitment to diversity, with half of respondents from the 2022 survey reporting some sort of negative experience from other members of the community.

The report adds that these experiences, on top of pay issues for staff and cost of attendance for students, lead to low morale and problems with retention for both staff and students. The cost of tuition is $67,420 this academic year, the second year in a row that officials raised tuition by 4.2 percent. In 2022 the cost of attendance exceeded $80,000 for the first time with tuition increasing from $59,780 to $62,110.

The plan states that the University has allocated an unspecified amount of new funding for nearly every individual school to create a diversity, equity and inclusion office, with eight schools already establishing one and the College of Professional Studies in the process of creating one. These offices will regularly meet with the Office of Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement beginning next academic year, according to the plan.

The report states the University will periodically review its diversity plan and develop a plan to use resources from ODECE with a committee of “key stakeholders.”

The report states the University acted on recommendations from the review team to provide more resources to the Multicultural Student Service Center like hiring three new staff members, which Bracey announced in April, and created a Center for Religious and Spiritual Life, which the University announced in June. The report adds that the University expects the full staffing of the MSSC to help meet a recommendation to improve diversity in student retention.

The MSSC hired a director and two staff members over the summer, after months of leadership vacancies and complaints from students and former staff about continuous staff turnover.

The report states the GW established a new protocol for all new buildings to have all-gender bathrooms but didn’t specify when. The report states officials plan to construct all-gender bathrooms in all the buildings that don’t currently have them, like the Elliott School of International Affairs.

The report also states that the University upgraded facilities by offering a prayer room on all three campuses, including a new “interfaith quiet room” on the Mount Vernon Campus, a ​​quiet room on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus and a renovated musalla on the Foggy Bottom Campus.

The plan said recommendations from the diversity review team to cluster hire faculty and researchers with expertise in racism and social justice will be taken under “consideration” when forming the University’s strategic framework development process, which is now being “built out and finalized,” according to the Office of the Provost website.

In February 2021, an informal group of department chairs and program directors circulated a petition calling on administrators to hire 18 minority faculty members “primarily” in the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences.

The report also responds to recommendations to share more information and expand diversity training for faculty and staff by stating the University’s optional diversity-related onboarding training for new faculty, a requirement for staff involved in interviews to complete equal employment opportunity training and an optional outgoing meeting or exit survey for employees that leave the University.

In February 2022, experts in higher education said the yearlong review process should consider marginalized community members within the University by considering past incidents of racism at the University and planning to continue holding town halls and surveys after the review process.

Students in 2020 said repeated racist incidents at GW had become “exhausting,” causing them to turn to the MSSC or the Office for Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement for a safe spaces on campus. In 2018 and 2019, sorority members posted racist images to Snapchat, and in 2020, a white professor admitted to having claimed a Black identity for years and former University President Thomas LeBlanc apologized after making an analogy that compared support for fossil fuel divestment to support for violence against Black people.

The survey closed in May 2022 and nearly one year later in March 2023, Bracey and former Vice Provost Caroline Laguerre-Brown held community forums to share findings from the survey, marking phase five of the updated seven-step initiative. The survey received nearly 8,000 responses, with half of the respondents having reported experiencing some kind of negative treatment based on their identity in the past five years.

During a Faculty Senate meeting on Friday, Jennifer Brinkerhoff, a faculty senator, a professor of international affairs and a member of the faculty subgroup for the Diversity Program Review team, said there were several proposals made by the subcommittee that went unaddressed in the report but didn’t specify which ones.

She added that she would like Bracey and the Provost’s office to have a meeting with the subgroup about the items that went unmentioned.

“I understand that you want to keep it succinct, and I understand that you can’t address everything that came out of every subcommittee, but it’s so general that it almost reads like you could’ve written it without all of that analysis and input,” Brinkerhoff said.