Dr. Judith Brown Clarke is a hurdler. She used to run through two-and-a-half-foot barriers in the Olympics for the silver medal. Now, she runs through high structural barriers to equitable and inclusive policies at New York’s No. 1 public university.
Clarke is the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at Stony Brook University. However, her vision for a more welcoming and fair world goes beyond the University. On Friday, Oct. 11, she spoke on a panel at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly called “The World is Not Designed for Women.”
The panel honored the first anniversary of the Equity 2030 Alliance, a project under the UN Population Fund that aims to design a world based on gender equity from the bottom up. Incorporating broad, diverse perspectives into her priority policies is important to Clarke, and being a panel speaker gave her the opportunity to do so. The initiative has members from 32 different countries across the globe, which allows Clarke to place her challenges at the University into perspective.
“Sometimes at the universities, we get caught in this bubble,” she said. “Universities are siloed.”
Clarke argues that solving the societal problem of gender inequity at the University without intersectional global awareness of the issue is meaningless. She considers every viewpoint, from alliance members to white supremacists, and attempts to address them in her plans.
Equity in science, technology and medicine are fields targeted by the Equity 2030 Alliance. As a part of the UN panel, Clarke brought her experience working with Stony Brook Medicine, the Renaissance School of Medicine and University researchers. Stony Brook is a globally-ranked top research institution and is a SUNY flagship university for its research capabilities. With all eyes on Stony Brook, keeping equity and inclusivity at the core of the University’s research is essential beyond the walls of the institution.
Clarke is interested in keeping Stony Brook at the forefront of diversity measures in the broader landscape of higher education. She describes the University as “driving” inclusivity efforts across other college campuses.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures are on the back burner for most American universities. In terms of demographics, 46.3% of Stony Brook’s full-time faculty are women; in comparison, 44% of tenure track university professors on average are women and only 36% are full-time. With this in mind, Clarke and her team worked to implement fair hiring practices at the University through a new hiring committee.
“[A hiring committee] typically would kind of self-organize. We’re far more intentional,” Clarke said. “What we do is we have an inclusive liaison. So before you can even pull your committee together, we’re making sure that the liaison and the full committee understands law, understands inclusive practices, understands from evidence-based and data and other promising practices — things that typically can encroach and become biased within a selection process.”
Members of her hiring committee are thoroughly trained on recognizing their implicit biases. This includes processes related to race, gender, working with candidates with ethnic names, gendered language and candidates with degrees from non-American schools. Clarke also ensured that female candidates who have taken maternity leave were not left off hiring lists.
“We know in particular that if you have a female that has taken time off of their tenure clock to have a family, that they may not have been as productive with grants and with publications because now they’re doing work-life balance,” Clarke said. “That is not a flaw. That is a skill that should be admired. That is not the current structure within higher education.”
While she aims to change the systems of higher education at the University, she said that in an ideal world, DEI policies would be incorporated throughout the education system.
“I think it’s important to incorporate [DEI] at [the] kindergarten [level],” Clarke said. “I wish we were a continuation of it. But here is why I work in higher education: how do I make a difference in this world?”
Clarke takes on the world through international athletics and intergovernmental meetings alike. The track she followed from the Olympics to the UN General Assembly panel was long and winding, but her passion for seeking equity and mutual understanding has been present throughout.
“For me, it just feels the same,” she said. “While I stood on a world stage and track in the Olympics, I saw it as sports diplomacy, because sports bring together the world, and there’s very few things that really bring the world together. The spirit of Olympianism is really the foundation of DEI.”