Transforming commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion into action
The College of Forestry focuses on creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment where staff and students, regardless of race, culture, gender identity, disability and sexual orientation are valued, supported and know they belong.

“We want to support and facilitate increased participation in DEI learning and action among the College of Forestry faculty, staff and students,” says Tom DeLuca, Cheryl Ramberg-Ford and Allyn C. Ford Dean of the OSU College of Forestry. “By increasing awareness of how many among us participate in and gain influence from systems of privilege and oppression, we can be better equipped to counter these systems and create a more diverse, equitable and welcoming community in our college, university and nation.”

Responding to the events of the past few years, including the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, the College of Forestry has made a strong commitment to building awareness and breaking down the barriers that oppress and suppress Black, Indigenous and other people of color within our country, the college and the broader fields of natural resources and forestry.

In the Fall of 2019, the college restructured the DEI committee into a seven-member workgroup to advance the actions in the DEI strategic plan and provide learning opportunities for the entire college. The college also established three taskforces to address curriculum and pedagogy, community building and inclusion, and recruitment and retention. Now, in addition to the college leadership team, 25 people are actively involved in achieving shared DEI goals. Led by Michele Justice, DEI Workgroup Lead, they have coordinated numerous events for college stakeholders to expand knowledge and change the college’s institutional culture.

Sampling of DEI accomplishments AND IMPACTS
• In June 2020, Bill Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology and Richardson Chair, generously funded the purchase of an anti-racist book for any staff member who requested one and distributed over 125 books. The college also launched a Commitment to Change scholarship, providing funds for DEI-related professional growth activities for all employees and graduate students.

• Michelle Maller, WSE internship and education coordinator, helped create “Breaking the Grain,” a women’s group designed to encourage networking and mentoring for females working in the forest products industry in the Pacific Northwest. Members meet quarterly for discussion and interaction with students from the Wood Science and Engineering program.

• The College of Forestry established new relationships with Hampton, Florida A&M and Tuskegee (all Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Kootenai Salish College as part of a submission to USDA’s Agricultural and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) for a Research and Extension Experiences for Undergraduates Fellowships programs.

• The college designed and positioned outside the Dean’s office in the George W. Peavy Forest Science Center a statement acknowledging that the land currently occupied by OSU is the traditional homeland of the Kalapuya.

• Faculty have been working to incorporate DEI in meaningful ways into classes and mentoring. Associate professor Meg Krawchuk included a new syllabus statement on pronouns and an open discussion of pronoun use with her classes on the first day. Assistant professor Ashley D’Antonio and Troy Hall, professor and Forest Ecosystems and Society Department head, hosted joint lab group discussions around diverse perspectives, such as the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

• Assistant professor Reem Hajjar developed modules on decolonizing methodologies for her research methods class.

• Every request for proposal issued by the College of Forestry Research Office for internally-funded projects now requires a description of how the project addresses equity and inclusion of diverse perspectives.

• The Research Forests faculty, staff and student team developed and engaged in informal pieces of training focused on understanding Oregon’s history of racism, white privilege and implicit bias. The training focused on what they can do as land managers, teachers, and students to advance the representation of BIPOC in outdoor recreation.

Student Groups & Organizations
• College of Forestry ambassadors participated in the Equal Opportunity and Access responsible employee training program, the Social Change Workshop with Community Engagement and Leadership, and helped with the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Bridge program.

• The Traditional Ecological Knowledge Club (TEKC) was formally established in Spring 2020 and hosts events to educate student peers and the wider community on Indigenous ways of understanding the natural world.

Student Recruitment & Admissions
• International students bring diversity to the College of Forestry, comprising more than 30% of the college’s graduate student population.

• Female students now represent 39 percent of the college undergraduate student population while underrepresented minorities (self-reported) make up 12 percent of the student body. Over the past five years, enrollment of female students is up 49 percent, while enrollment of underrepresented minorities is up 30 percent.

• 10 percent of COF students are Veterans or military-connected (compared to 3 percent of OSU’s student population), and 32 percent self-identify as the first in their families to attend college (compared to 24 percent of OSU’s student population).

This story was part of the College of Forestry’s 2019-2020 Biennial Report.

The College of Forestry is committed to addressing personal and systemic forms of privilege and oppression, adopting anti-racist practices and engaging in teaching, learning and research that supports the eradication of racism and the pursuit of equity in higher education and the field of natural resources.

To engage students in this important work, Eric Jones, a faculty instructor with Ecampus, created a course called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in Natural Resource Management for students enrolled in the Master of Natural Resources program (MNR). The College of Forestry’s MNR program, offered through Ecampus, is consistently recognized as one of the top natural resources programs in the country and provides a platform for equity in higher education, serving a non-traditional student demographic who often have additional commitments, such as family obligations, job responsibilities and financial constraints.

Jones’ course examined the systemic dynamics of historical inequality and power differentials in natural resource management. It covered concepts like implicit bias, structural racism, assimilation, cultural competency, intersectionality, agency and social justice.

Jones’ goal with the course was to help students understand how the many different pieces that encompass DEI can be brought together in a cohesive framework to analyze real-world problems and recommend solutions that support the principles of DEI. Jones also wanted students to recognize and challenge their own cultural biases and learn listening and facilitation techniques to identify, understand and manage diverse and conflicting views of individuals and groups.

“This class was full of amazing people,” Jones says, “and every participant came to the class already equipped with an understanding of pieces of DEI principles.”

Jones’ original plan was to co-develop and co-teach the course with a colleague that identifies as an underrepresented person. He began the initial planning stages with that colleague and then COVID-19 turned the world upside down, forcing him to scale back and create the first version of the course himself.

“However,” Jones says, “I do not want to be a gatekeeper that isn’t open to fresh perspectives and energy or somebody else teaching the course altogether.”

Jones explains that it wasn’t hard to identify critical topics essential to include within the course, but distilling their complexity and fitting them all together into a meaningful eleven-week term for students proved far more challenging and time-consuming than anticipated.

“For one, I had to be positive that how I understood issues reflected current scholarly thinking, so I did an extensive literature review and read more than I had since graduate school,” he explains. “I drew inspiration and courage from the never-ending headlines of hate, inequity, and injustice that characterized spring and summer 2020. I appreciated the positive public messaging and reassurance from OSU administrators, colleagues, and students during this time.”

Jones’ interests and professional experience helped him develop and teach the course. In 1997, Jones was a fellow in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Community-based Environmental Protection Program, which closely aligned with the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice. In 1998, he co-founded and co-managed the now-retired Institute for Culture and Ecology for 13 years, which had the explicit mission of bringing social science to natural resource problem-solving.

“Analyzing systems of power, justice, and equity to protect and promote cultural diversity and inclusiveness were commonplace in our projects,” he says.

Jones had reservations about teaching this course online because the subject matter can be emotionally taxing. He places a premium on fostering discussion spaces where people feel safe and supported to express critical thinking and share experiences and was unsure if he could create that kind of environment online.

“I feel safer teaching these kinds of emotionally charged subjects on-campus, but I’m not sure that is justified,” Jones says. “I’ve come to learn over the years that some students thrive in the online environment. What I’ve found is that it is better for me to actively participate in the online discussions, letting students have space to interact with each other, but also for us to interact as a community.”

Jones was impressed with the thoughtful responses and high engagement from students.

“I wanted the class to feel that they could engage deeply with difficult and often tragic subject matter such as systemic racism, unethical science, and cultural appropriation and come out the other end feeling more hopeful and more empowered,” he explains.

“Did this happen? Based on the feedback I received, it seems participants generally felt hopeful and empowered, but while that is nice, what matters to me is what they do in the future. Lasting social change takes a long time. It is tough to measure the underlying catalysts, but I will say the students are extraordinary individuals. They give me great hope for a future where someday DEI principles are woven into the way people think, and societies work.” Learn more about DEI in the College of Forestry.

This story was part of the College of Forestry’s 2019-2020 Biennial Report.

In March 2020, during week 10 of the winter term and shortly after faculty and staff began moving into the newly constructed George W. Peavy Forest Science Center, the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a global pandemic. COVID-19 completely changed the landscape of higher education, and as the pandemic continued to spread and the remainder of 2020 shifted alongside it, the College of Forestry quickly adapted to support students.

“During this challenging time, staff and faculty adapted quickly, working to provide ideas, courses and programs that met students where they were at with real solutions to complete research and support their progress towards their academic goals,” said Tom DeLuca, the Cheryl Ramberg-Ford and Allyn C. Ford Dean of the College of Forestry.

When stay-at-home and social distancing orders came down from the governor’s office in March, Ethan Harris, a senior in forest engineering, had to change course to complete his senior capstone project. Instead of surveying a stand on Starker Forests lands in the Oregon Coast range to appraise its value, develop a harvest plan and coordinate with mills and truckers, he had to cancel his survey work and timber cruises and coordinate team project meetings virtually through Zoom. Woodam Chung, Stewart Professor of Forest Operations, helped Harris find available data and complete the project.

Another senior, Wade Christensen, had a similar experience for his capstone project. Help arrived in the form of remotely sensed LIDAR data from a leading expert in the field, Bogdan Strimbu, assistant professor in forest biometrics and geomatics. Allowing for differences between direct observation and point clouds, Christensen estimated timber volumes and completed his work.

Both Harris and Christensen graduated on time, but they are examples of the stressful scramble brought on by pandemic restrictions last spring. Adjusting capstone projects, jumping into remote classes, recalibrating internships, filling gaps in students’ resources — all fell to faculty, advisors and support staff.

For Nicole Kent, manager of advising & academic relations for the College of Forestry, the shift became all-consuming. She and her team make sure that the college’s nearly 1,000 undergraduates get the courses and experiences they need. They also conduct student orientations and other events.

Only about half of those students are on the Corvallis campus. Others work at OSU Cascades in Bend, at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande or through Ecampus. “We were already doing a lot of remote teaching. That gave the college a head start in adjusting to the pandemic,” Kent said.

Most students in Corvallis are there because they want to learn in person — in the forest, on field trips, in labs, face to face. With COVID restrictions in place, students saw internships and other work-experience opportunities evaporate. Some courses were cancelled and others shifted to the computer screen.

Nevertheless, the College of Forestry prides itself on producing work-ready graduates, so advisors and faculty shifted gears to find alternatives. They determined what courses would provide the required learning outcomes and kept students on the path to graduation.

“I can’t say enough about how wonderful the Student Services team is and how hard they have worked,” Kent said. “They were all at home working remotely. They stepped up to show such great care and compassion for our students.”

Those efforts included finding financial help when income had suddenly dried up. The OSU Foundation led an effort that saw over 3,000 donors contribute over $1 million for Beavers Care, an initiative to make a difference for OSU students, faculty and staff in urgent need of emergency support. College staff navigated the federal CARES Act to determine who was eligible for assistance and who was not. Staff also identified additional university resources to help fill gaps in their personal lives, such as access to groceries and medications.

Even laboratory-based classes, which usually take place in person, transformed to adapt to remote delivery. Wood science and engineering professor Lech Muszynski successfully adapted his renewable materials laboratory class. The class utilized a combination of online lectures, team assignments, video clips with recorded lab routines and procedures, discussions and publicly available web content. Elements of Muszynski’s innovative class strategies were shared with the OSU campus community as part of a best practice webinar series.

Staff in the college’s IT office also made extraordinary efforts to ensure all students had access to computers and the internet at home. During the same weeks the college was moving into the new Peavy Forest Science Center building, IT was assisting students with Zoom meeting software, loaner computers and off-campus access to computer labs.

Throughout the year, OSU and the college communicated with students, sending updates about available resources and helping people who were struggling with isolation.

“As this crisis unfolded and continues to unfold, we believe it is more critical than ever to support each other,” DeLuca said. “Our first priority is the safety and well-being of our community and we will continue to do everything we can to support academic success and the College of Forestry community.”

This story was part of the College of Forestry’s 2019-2020 Biennial Report.