The Right Way to Engage with Your Institutional Heritage
Everything you need to know to avoid the perceived perils of navigating historical legacies of oppression
This resource provides step-by-step guidance to assist colleges and universities in their efforts towards institutional reckoning and healing.
Faced with increasing pressure from students, alumni, faculty, and staff, colleges and universities must fully engage with their institutional heritage—a process through which institutions acknowledge and redress their role in certain populations’ historical and ongoing oppression. In addition to redressing past harms, confronting historical legacies of oppression builds a stronger foundation for all diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice efforts moving forward.
Despite a foundation of work, however, there is no clear roadmap to contextualizing and implementing change based on historical legacies. To help, EAB has developed this guide to assist colleges and universities in their efforts toward institutional reckoning and healing.
Read on to learn more, or download the full tool as a PDF.
How to use this guide
Consider the questions below as you decide where to begin or to go next. Based on how many times you say ”no” for each section and the needs of your institution, select an area to begin working on. Then click on the corresponding link to continue to a detailed step-by-step guide and suggested resources to apply this framework on your campus.
Reckon
Explore and acknowledge historical harms through defined and resourced research initiatives
- Does your campus understand the importance of engaging with institutional heritage?
- Are there key stakeholders on campus who present roadblocks to change or resist institutional heritage and DEIJ work?
- Do campus leaders feel comfortable holding conversations about institutional heritage or other DEIJ efforts?
If no, review: A guide to securing buy-in
- Has your institution documented its involvement in historic systems of oppression?
- Is the history of harm and its continued impact widely discussed and understood on campus
If no, review: If no, review:Â A guide to historical storytelling and collective memory projects
Build
Form healthy and collaborative relationships with harmed communities
- Have you identified specific harmed communities?
- Do you understand the needs of those harmed communities?
- Does your institution have existing partnerships with those communities?
If no, review: A guide to building healthy relationships with harmed communities
Transform
Redesign harmful legacy policies and practices that continue to perpetuate racial oppression
- Is engaging in institutional heritage work part of your broader, long-term strategy?
- Does your campus have a formal plan outlining actionable next steps?
- Are there accountability mechanisms to ensure institutional heritage work is being accomplished and achieving the intended result?
If no, review: A guide to setting long-term strategy and taking action
Reckon
Preparing your campus community for change
Exploring the procedures, beliefs, and systems that are built into the very fabric and nature of higher education is a challenging exercise. Even leaders committed to systemic change often struggle to truly grapple with legacies of injustice.
Additionally, concerns about impact on donor relations and the potential for increased activism, tension with the local community, and negative media attention often prevent institutions from making meaningful progress. Strategically assessing and preparing for risks better equips institutional leaders to manage their campus through the process. Follow the steps in the guide below to:
- Assess current attitudes toward and understanding of institutional heritage
- Manage pushback from resistant stakeholders
- Manage uncomfortable emotions and dialogue
A guide to securing buy-in
1. Assess your institution’s readiness
- Consider these guiding questions to gauge leadership support, alignment with strategic goals, and infrastructure to measure the appetite and capacity for institutional heritage work.
- Use EAB’s tool to assess key stakeholders’ (e.g., the cabinet, students, alumni) readiness for institutional heritage work by examining how they relate to and are impacted by this work. Based on this assessment, identify specific individuals to target for further intervention or communication.
2. Identify the reasons influential stakeholders may resist change
- Learn about the procedural, institutional, and interpersonal risks of engaging with your institution’s heritage to better understand the barriers to progress.
- Analyze the barriers to change with EAB’s Risk Scoring Framework to prioritize those that pose the biggest obstacles.
3. Mitigate pushback from resistant stakeholders with a robust action and communication plan for addressing barriers
- Create a Treatment Plan outlining action steps and resources needed to prevent or mitigate the top risks and barriers to change on your campus.
- Use Seramount’s Guide to Essential Conversations for a framework to lead productive discussions about sensitive topics.
Acknowledging past harms
When grappling with legacies of historical harms, most institutions focus on visible, short-term solutions to present-day problems without investing resources to explore their root causes. As a result, the lingering effects—and even the harms themselves—remain largely undocumented and unknown on individual campuses.
When institutions deprioritize the exploration of their own histories and instead fast-track short-term solutions, they leave themselves vulnerable to ongoing criticism and flashpoints. A complete and collective understanding of harmful past events is a fundamental element of any successful effort to reckon or heal because it builds credibility, creates understanding, and informs actions going forward. Follow the steps in the guide below to:
- Detail your institution’s specific historical connections to oppression (racial, gender-based, ableist, etc.)
- Surface and understand enduring legacies and impacts
- Disseminate and engage stakeholders in findings
A guide to historical storytelling and collective memory projects
1. Gauge the current understanding of your institutional history and identify critical gaps
Consider the following questions:
- Has my institution detailed our specific historical connections to oppression?
- Has my institution surfaced the enduring impacts of our historical legacy?
- Has my institution planned for widespread and sustained engagement with the details of our historical legacy?
2. Commission an archival project to detail your institution’s historical connections to oppression
Archival projects explore and document historical records to create a publicly accessible narrative of an institution’s past and connects that past to present inequities.
- Ensure your archival project is centrally commissioned, led by scholars, engages the community and focuses on action. See EAB’s guidance on this topic for more details and institutional examples.
3. Develop a collective memory project to begin embedding this history into your institution’s culture and educate the broader community
Distinct from archival projects, collective memory projects seek to integrate histories into the university through many forms including physical memorials (e.g., statues and building names), academic courses, and immersive digital experiences.
- Ensure your collective memory project prioritizes education, is available and actively presented through different media, and is widely disseminated. See EAB’s guidance on this topic for more details and specific institutional examples.
Build
Institutions often have limited relationships with harmed communities and do not fully understand their lived experiences. As a result, institutions fail to explicitly name the populations and communities they are trying to serve—let alone accurately identify their needs and priorities. Putting the perspective of harmed communities at the center and building mechanisms for ongoing collaboration is critical to developing targeted solutions. Follow these steps to:
- Identify harmed communities
- Understand the needs, wants, and experiences of those communities
- Repair frayed relationships and trust
A guide to building healthy relationships with harmed communities
1. Identify how systemic racism manifests among your campus community to accurately target specific populations
Schedule a presentation of EAB’s workshop Creating a Shared Understanding of Institutional Racism to better understand systemic racism and why institutions’ efforts often do not achieve the desired outcome.
2. Conduct a community needs assessment (CNA) to incorporate the voices of harmed communities and inform future action
A CNA is a mechanism to understand a population’s needs, identify both the strengths and gaps of existing programming within a defined community, and create or enhance equitable programming.
- Follow EAB’s guide to creating a community needs assessment to define your plan’s parameters, identify a diverse team and assign responsibilities, create a data collection plan, secure funding, and determine a timeline for implementation.
3. Analyze the root cause of flashpoints on your campus to avoid repeating mistakes that contribute to trust gaps among the campus community
Use EAB’s Flashpoint Post-Mortem Analysis Tool to understand how racial flashpoints connect to your institutional history so you can address the broader context rather than the symptoms and restore trust with harmed communities.
Transform
When engaging with their institutional heritage, colleges and universities all too often focus on quick fixes and largely symbolic solutions that only serve to further exacerbate trust gaps. Understanding the implications of different potential solutions and creating clear guidelines for prioritization, implementation, and evaluation will enable you to work toward long-term transformation. Follow the steps in the guide below to:
- Articulate the scope and desired outcomes with an action plan
- Create accountability measures
- Measure the effectiveness of the plan and surface new areas for action
- Establish funding mechanisms to support strategic priorities
A guide to setting long-term strategy and taking action
1. Define the desired outcome of successfully engaging with your institutional heritage
Workshop a vision statement that clearly establishes a long-term vision of what campus will look like if you successfully address historical harms.
2. Create an action plan to establish a coherent and central strategy
Use EAB’s Institutional DEIJ Plan Starter Kit as a framework for creating an effective action plan.
- Initiate the planning process by choosing your time planning horizon, organizing your planning team, and grounding your plan with an organizational framework.
- Develop your plan by assessing the current state of institutional heritage work at your institution, collecting stakeholder feedback (e.g., the results of a community needs assessment), and engaging in a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis.
- Use EAB’s guidance to develop actionable goals and objectives based on your review of your current status.
- Define metrics that measure success and impact, instill accountability, and inform future work.
3. Conduct a premortem exercise to anticipate the barriers to new strategic initiatives
Identify potential barriers to your strategy with EAB’s tool for analyzing stakeholder experiences with similar initiatives attempted by the institution in the past.
4. Implement your institutional heritage plan
- Operationalize strategic initiatives by assigning project owners for goals and establishing concrete deadlines.
- Establish an ongoing communications process to encourage accountability, establish trust with groups that have previously been disappointed by institutional efforts, and share wins and celebrate successes.
5. Establish funding streams to support long-term institutional heritage work
- Craft a business case to allocate funding toward initiatives.
- Incorporate strategic goals, like institutional heritage work, into the budget model.
- Develop a cohesive fundraising strategy for institutional heritage work and other DEIJ initiatives.
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