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17 This chapter examines the role of faculty agency and interdisciplinary collaboration in transforming the climate of diversity at the University of Maryland (UM). It suggests that faculty agency and collaboration have infused a deeper understanding of social inequality (including race, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference) into teaching, learning, and research in units across the university and beyond its walls. To illuminate these processes of intellectual, social, and institutional change, we draw from the experiences and collaboration histories of three faculty members: Bonnie Thornton Dill, director of the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity and chair and professor of the women’s studies department; Sharon Harley, chair and associate professor of the African American studies department; and Deborah Rosenfelt , professor of women’s studies and director of the Curriculum Transformation Project, which often partners with the women’s studies department. Working both independently and collectively, these faculty members have significantly influenced UM’s diversity climate by leading campus institutions that promote social change, showing that teaching, research, mentoring, and faculty development can bring about institutional transformation. Our collaborative project was suggested by Ford Foundation Program Officer Margaret Wilkerson, who, after hearing proposals from each entity, suggested that a coordinated approach would be a more effective intervention. Together, the three units designed and conducted a series of three projects which emphasized each program’s unique expertise and their shared commitment to scholarship at the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and other areas of difference. Each of these projects was supported by Ford Foundation funding, the most recent of which is titled “Collaborative Transformations in the Academy: Re-Constructing 1 Instituting a Legacy of Change Transforming the Campus Climate at the University of Maryland through Intellectual Leadership AMY MCLAUGHLIN, BONNIE THORNTON DILL, SHARON HARLEY, AND DEBORAH ROSENFELT the Study of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Nation.” Our collaboration was enabled by a happy confluence of intellectual engagement, political commitment, and temperament that gave us not only shared aspirations but also shared inclinations toward mutual support, not to be minimized in the university’s current entrepreneurial and competitive environment. This chapter grows from a similar collaborative process. As a research project it has been shaped especially by Amy McLaughlin, who conducted both individual and group interviews with Dill, Harley, and Rosenfelt, transcribed the interviews, and drafted the first version. Both the interview transcripts and the chapter itself were subsequently revised by a series of substantive and editorial interventions on our (Dill, Harley, and Rosenfelt’s) parts. In much of the chapter, however, we use the third person about ourselves as collaborators, respecting Amy McLaughlin’s shaping voice. The featured faculty members have used three important interventions: interdisciplinary and collaborative investments, mentorship of the next generation of scholars, and the fostering of institutional change. Through this work they have sought to give scholars the tools to integrate intersectionality— that is, a focus on race, gender, and other dimensions of social difference not only as connected but as mutually constitutive—into their scholarship and teaching. Intersectionality is an outgrowth of both feminist and critical race theory and asserts that people have multiple, layered identities and social locations, simultaneously experiencing both oppression and privilege. The roots of this scholarly approach lie in analyses of the lived experiences of women of color, whose intellectual and social justice work reveal how aspects of identity and social relations are shaped by the simultaneous operation of multiple systems of power. Intersectional scholarship is interdisciplinary, focusing on how structures of difference combine to create new and distinct social, cultural, and artistic forms as well as to constitute complex identities. It is intellectually transformative because it centers the experiences of people of color and locates its analysis within systems of ideological, political, and economic power as they are shaped by historical patterns of race, class, gender , sexuality, nation, ethnicity, and age. Moreover, it provides a platform for uniting analysis, theory, education, advocacy, and policy development in pursuit of social justice. (See Crenshaw ; Collins ; and Dill et al. in press for key works on intersectionality.) Transformative change cannot occur without commitment from the top. Historically a segregated institution, UM enrolled its first black undergraduate in , when Brown v. Board of Education compelled the University of Maryland Board of Regents to admit students to all state campuses without regard to race. But the university system remained segregated in fact if not in law for three decades. It was not until  that the university finally presented an acceptable plan to the Office of Civil...

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