Inclusive Excellence is at the heart of our work at the School of International Service. Varied perspectives help generate better ideas to solve the complex challenges of today’s world. For the next generation of leaders, ensuring that different perspectives, experiences, and identities are valued and heard will be essential for achieving greater creativity, deeper self-learning, transnational cooperation, and enhanced capacity for collective impact. As a top-ten school of international affairs, we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to practice these values in everything we do. SIS embraces our responsibility to prepare students for these leadership roles in the service of the world.

Achieving our goals requires an unwavering commitment to challenge and dismantle ongoing obstacles embedded in our society that disproportionately impact historically underserved groups in higher education and the professional field of international affairs.

SIS commits to increasing fostering and promoting an inclusive excellence mindset through the following actions:

• fostering a climate of understanding and support to enable an SIS community that serves everyone well
• actively listening to, learning from, and reflecting on the range of contributions and experiences of our local and global communities
• recruiting students, staff, faculty, and administrators in communities that have often been left out by creating strategic partnerships and pipelines
• enriching course curricula and scholarship to broaden representation of voices and viewpoints 
• increasing the use of inclusive pedagogical approaches in the classroom—which integrate scholars, methods, and topics that have often been left out—to better serve all students
• advancing knowledge that values marginalized methods and topics to broaden the field and its audience while creating space to amplify works of scholars that have not been recognized for their value in the field
• preparing students to practice respect and empathy across difference in their careers and lives
• assisting all students, staff, faculty, and administrators in learning to engage with a wide variety of people, ideas, cultures, and traditions
• using our social capital to expand professional and educational pathways for students from underserved groups
• expanding financial and other resources designated for making student access to academic, experiential, and professional development opportunities more possible for all students 
• offering programs and events to highlight both topics that often have been excluded from discourse as well as structural barriers that inhibit the field of international affairs