The Campus Diversity Initiative records document the planning and implementation of a
number of projects undertaken by the University of Wisconsin between 1988 and 2008 in order
to broadly recenter diversity and inclusion in the University's activity. A spate of
incidents of discriminatory activity on and off the campus of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison between 1986 and 1988 and subsequent campus protests garnered national
press attention and set the tone for discussions about diversity and the campus climate to
permeate the top levels of university administration. In response to the Phi Gamma Delta
"Island Party" incident and the protests lead by the Black Student Union, the UW-Madison
created the Steering Committee on Minority Affairs. The final report of this Committee,
colloquially known as the Holley Report after Professor Charles Holley, was published by the
Chancellor's office in 1987. The Holley Report highlighted a number of concerns which would
be echoed in much of the campus diversity planing that would follow, including the low rates
of acceptance and retention for students of color, the lack of outreach programs and
multicultural institutions on campus, and the lack of multicultural elements in the
undergraduate curriculum. The Madison Plan, the first of UW-Madison's comprehensive
diversity action plans would follow the next year.
UW-Madison was not alone in its prioritization of diversity issues. The University of
Wisconsin System was, by 1988, also in the midst of its own diversity program, the Design
for Diversity. Design for Diversity called for the Chancellor's of all UW System schools to
present to the System President in one year a comprehensive plan to address key diversity
areas on each campus over the next ten years. UW-Madison's "Madison Plan" served as its
report to the System President.
The chief concern of Design for Diversity was the recruitment and retention of so called
"targeted minority" students in the State of Wisconsin, these plans both sought to address a
raft of issues which either represented barriers to entry for students with targeted
minority backgrounds or hindered their successful participation, contribution, and eventual
graduation from courses of study on UW campuses. By "targeted minority" the plan
specifically indicated African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, American Indians, and South
East Asian and Pacific Islanders. These groups had seen, over the preceding decades, rates
of admission and graduation proportionally lower than their representation in the states
population as a whole. The diversity plans both identified a number of factors in this
under-representation including the financial burden of University education, the hostile
campus climate and lack of institutions focused on multicultural issues, the
underrepresentation of these same groups in faculty, academic staff, and graduate students,
and the lack of representation for these groups in curricula and course offerings.
The Madison Plan sought to create measurable goals and implementation time tables for the
creation and expansion of campus resources which would increase access for minority
students, build the presence of minority and multicultural institutions on campus, and
broaden the available courses of study pertaining to underrepresented groups. This included
expanding financial aid resources, stepping up recruitment efforts in High Schools including
specifically those in Dane county and the City of Milwaukee, creating mentorship programs
and initiating campus-wide tracking programs to find and offer assistance to students in
danger of dropping out. In addition, the Madison Plan created a number of outreach
initiatives, including school-university partnerships and the Upward Bound program,
workshops for school teachers, and summer campus programs for disadvantaged students before
and after admission. Finally, the Madison Plan required that an "Ethnic Studies" course
would be required for every student pursuing a degree on the Madison campus and demanded the
creation of new campus institutes and the hiring of more minority faculty members to support
these new course offerings.
In 1998, ten years after the Design for Diversity had been formally adopted by the
University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, planning began for another comprehensive document
that would centralize campus diversity planning for the next ten years. The result, Plan
2008, again required all System campuses to submit formal plans to meet the goals of Plan
2008 within one year of its adoption. Planning for the UW-Madison campus began late that
year with the intention of presenting ideas to the campus community and gathering feed back
in early 1999 and drafting the final version of the plan that summer. Plan 2008 created a
number of campus initiatives including an annual campus forum on diversity issues and
outreach programs like the Precollege Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence
(PEOPLE). Plan 2008 echoed many of the same concerns and recommendations espoused first in
the Holey Report and then again in Design for Diversity and the Madison Plan.
