Commitment to Diversity

The SBU Department of Ecology and Evolution is a community of faculty, students, and staff from a wide range of cultures, nationalities, and socio-economic backgrounds. We are committed, both individually and collectively, to encouraging the inclusion of individuals from a broad range of backgrounds, and to maintaining a culture of belonging, respect and kindness that encourages intellectual growth of all. Beyond the clear moral justification for these values, they relate to intellectual diversity and the free flow of ideas, and therefore serve our core goals as scientists and educators. This commitment echoes the mission statements of the State University of New York and of Stony Brook University which respectively call us to serve “all segments of the population” and to “celebrate diversity.” To meet the demands of our values, we must therefore engage, as a department, in a level of discussion and introspection on these issues that is most likely unprecedented in our long history. With this statement, we commit to an honest effort to engage with the evidence, in the hopes of understanding the limits to participation in our fields so we can devise new policies that reduce barriers to inclusion.