Last Updated: April 2024

At the University of Michigan, our dedication to academic excellence is inseparable from our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. These are core values that are strengthened by more than 30 years of definitive research showing that diversity improves performance and innovation. By bringing together people from a wide variety of experiences, we are able to address problems more creatively and from a variety of perspectives. That helps us work more effectively to solve the biggest challenges that affect us all.

When we talk about diversity, we mean diversity in the broadest sense – including race and ethnicity, national origin, gender and gender identity, socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, disability, political perspective and more.

At U-M, students, faculty and staff members must have the opportunity to excel and thrive. They must be free to be themselves and fully engage with our community. In this way, our commitment to diversity and inclusion is inexorably linked with our commitment to free inquiry and expression. For it is only by giving people freedom to think, speak and write without fear or censor that we are able to foster robust debate.

In a community of scholars such as ours, differences must be welcomed and various perspectives must be freely shared. This is a critical part of our search for knowledge and discovery.

This approach of welcoming diversity in all of its forms is not new for U-M. We were, for example, one of the first universities to admit women in 1870 and, in the early 1900s, we welcomed Jewish students who were being turned away from Ivy League universities. In the 1970s, we established the first campus center in the nation to support LGBTQ+ students and, in 2003, we defended race-conscious admission policies before the U.S. Supreme Court. Our GoBlue Guarantee program, established in 2017, is a model for improving access for first generation and lower income students.

For us, our commitment to diversity is a key part of our commitment to become the best that we can be at this time and better than we were before. We look forward, knowing that – by working together, across many types of affiliations, identities, and communities – our greatest innovations and discoveries are yet to come.