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College of Arts and Letters Part of National Blueprint for Advancing College Equity and Excellence

Jan 13, 2023

As a member of the Boyer 2030 CommissionKathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, participated in the development of a national blueprint for undergraduate education at U.S. research universities.

This new blueprint, created to address persistent equity gaps in undergraduate educational outcomes, recently was released by the Boyer 2030 Commission in an effort to advance equity, student success, and excellence in undergraduate education at research universities in the United States. This comprehensive report, titled The Equity-Excellence Imperative: A 2030 Blueprint for Undergraduate Education at U.S. Research Universities, calls upon research universities to make equity a top priority, equally important to excellence.

The Boyer 2030 Commission report states that “excellence and equity are inextricably entwined, such that excellence without equity (privilege reproducing privilege) is not true excellence, and equity (mere access) without excellence is unfulfilled promise.”

“The equity/excellence imperative has to do with our ability to serve all of our students as well as we possibly can,” Fitzpatrick said.

The Boyer 2030 Commission, through the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (formed in 2000), is a diverse group of renowned leaders whose experience and expertise provide distinctive perspectives on undergraduate education at the nation’s 266 doctoral universities characterized by high and very high research activity (as defined by the Carnegie Classification). Members of the commission are part of research universities that serve millions of undergraduate students annually in ways distinct from liberal arts colleges, regional and comprehensive universities, community, and technical colleges.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Letters website.