Mindful of the mission and aspirations described above, the Working Group on Diversity and Inclusion, in consultation with the Office of the Dean of the College,drafted a charge in May of 2014. The Working Group was to “assess Harvard College’s learning environment in order to ensure that all students benefit equally from its liberal arts educational and service mission.” The task included consulting with stakeholders across the University, incorporating research at the intersections of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other frames of identity and difference, and examining approaches at peer institutions in order to recommend models that might be applied or reimagined on Harvard’s campus.

This chapter, which draws on recent work in psychology to demonstrate the socially situated nature of human intelligence, shows that intellectual performance is not simply lodged within individuals' high test scores, straight As are not owned by a person alone, and poor scores or bad grades are not only the student's responsibility. Rather, intellectual performance is an emergent property of persons and social situations—an interaction between the two. These findings suggest that conceptualizing “intelligence” as a stable property of individuals and a reliable way of distinguishing between them may be inappropriate.

Damon Williams, Joseph Berger, and Shederick McClendon offer a framework for comprehensive organizational change to help campuses achieve Inclusive Excellence. The authors review several dimensions of organizational culture that must be engaged to achieve this goal and discuss a method to help campuses monitor changes that might come from introducing new systems and new practices. The resulting framework, perhaps most importantly, helps campus leaders focus simultaneously on the “big picture” — an academy that systematically leverages diversity for student learning and institutional excellence — and the myriad individual pieces that contribute to that picture

Pragmatic political reasons exist for insisting on the possibility of thinking about women as some kind of group. An argument is presented for reconceptualizing social collectivity or the meaning of social groups as what Jean-Paule Sartre describes as a phenomenon of serial collectivity in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason."

The goal of the Pipeline Project, part of the Stanford Campus Diversity Initiative funded by a grant from the James W. Irvine Foundation, is to analyze the factors that affect academic career choices, particularly of underrepresented minorities and women, with the goal of increasing faculty diversity.