AMIGA Forum for Holistic Graduate Admissions — October 19-20, 2018

The AMIGA Forum—a 1.5 day event focused on holistic admissions for humanities faculty and administrators—will be held at UCLA’s Carnesale Commons, beginning at noon on Friday, October 19 and ending on Saturday, October 20 at 5:30pm.

The Alliance for Multi-campus Inclusive Graduate Admissions is a Mellon Foundation-funded project that aims to encourage adoption of equitable and inclusive admissions practices in humanities PhD programs at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of California, Davis (UC Davis). This meeting will be the first opportunity that the project’s faculty and administrative participants have to come together across fields and across campuses, and learn about the newest research and recommended admissions practices from leaders in the graduate admissions community.

The AMIGA Forum keynote speakers will be Yvette Gullatt, vice provost for diversity and engagement and chief outreach officer for the University of California system, and Raquel Aldana, associate vice chancellor for academic diversity and professor of law at UC Davis.

You will have the opportunity to learn the most current research-based practices for graduate holistic review, recruitment, and facilitating department-level change from nationally recognized experts Julie Posselt and Casey Miller, principal investigators of the Inclusive Graduate Education Network and the California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education. In breakout groups, you will be able to apply this new knowledge and discuss challenges and goals in your own departments, generating ideas and strategies to enhance your admissions processes.

Who should attend:
This event is by invitation only to members and friends of the Alliance for Multi-campus Inclusive Graduate Admissions.

Registration is now closed.

Registration is free, and all meals will be provided (lunch and dinner on Friday, breakfast and lunch on Saturday). For those traveling from Davis, please contact Josephine Moreno (mjmoreno@ucdavis.edu) to make travel arrangements.

Hosts:

• Robin Garrell, Vice Provost for Graduate Education, UCLA
• Norma Mendoza-Denton, Associate Dean of the Graduate Division, UCLA
• Josephine Moreno, Graduate Diversity Officer, UC Davis
• Julie Posselt, Assistant Professor of Higher Education, USC Rossier School of Education

Be sure to follow the Pullias Center on Facebook and Twitter for updates and announcements as the event approaches.

Location:
UCLA Carnesale Commons, 251 Charles E Young Drive West, Los Angeles
View and download directions and parking information

Schedule
Fri., Oct. 19, 2018 to Sat., Oct. 20, 2018
View and download the agenda

View and download the full conference program

Raquel Aldana joined University of California, Davis, in July 2017 to serve as the inaugural associate vice chancellor for academic diversity. In this role, she has led important initiatives such as the institutionalization of ADVANCE, serving as co-chair of the Hispanic Serving Institution Taskforce, and collaborating with other administrative units and deans to promote the integration and work of faculty who bring multicultural perspectives and contributions to their research, teaching and service. Aldana came to UC Davis after 17 years as a Law professor during which she instituted service learning initiatives to provide legal services to immigrants, created study abroad programs to instill the values and attitudes of intercultural sensitivity into cross-cultural lawyering, and produced engaged scholarship focused on transitional justice, rule of law reforms in Post-conflict societies and immigrant rights. Aldana is an immigrant from Central America (Guatemala and El Salvador) and a first-generation college student. Her mentors and the civil rights struggles of many allowed her to graduate from Harvard Law School and to dedicate her career to creating meaningful access into higher education for others.

Yvette Gullatt is the vice provost for diversity and engagement and chief outreach officer for the University of California system. As vice provost, she is responsible for implementing UC’s mission of inclusive excellence through sustainable policies, practices and programs. Yvette joined the UC Office of the President in 1999 as the systemwide director for early and immediate outreach. She has held various leadership positions, including vice provost for education partnerships. In this role, she worked to expand UC’s role in public education, developing data systems that help schools improve eligibility rates for UC and CSU. She holds BA, MA and PhD degrees in English from University of California, Berkeley. She is a graduate of the Management Development Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and of the UC-CORO Systemwide Leadership Collaborative.

Casey W. Miller is associate dean for research and faculty affairs in the College of Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is an experimental physicist focusing on nanoscale magnetic materials and diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM graduate education. He graduated summa cum laude from Wittenberg University in 1999 with university and physics departmental honors, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  He earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, earning the department’s best dissertation award for work combining magnetic resonance imaging with scanning probe microscopy.  His postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego, focused on quantum tunneling of electrons between magnetic films.  He is recipient of the NSF-CAREER and AFOSR-Young Investigator Awards. He served as Director of the University of South Florida’s APS Bridge Site, which was created by the American Physical Society in 2013.

Julie Posselt is an assistant professor of higher education in the USC Rossier School of Education and was a 2015-2017 National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation postdoctoral research fellow. She examines institutionalized inequalities in higher education and organizational efforts aimed at reducing inequities and encouraging diversity. Her focus is selective sectors of higher education— especially graduate education—where longstanding practices and norms are being negotiated to better identify talent and educate students in a changing society. Posselt was the recipient of the 2018 American Educational Research Association’s Early Career Award and the 2017 Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Early Career/ Promising Scholar Award. Her book, Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping (2016, Harvard University Press), was based on an award-winning ethnographic study of faculty judgment in 10 highly ranked doctoral programs in three universities. This work has led to thriving research-practice partnerships with universities, disciplinary societies, graduate schools & programs, and others that are re-examining how we evaluate students and scholars.