LESSONS LEARNED BY THE UT AUSTIN URGE MEGAPOD AND OUR PLAN FOR CONTINUED ACTION

Over 90 members of the Jackson School of Geosciences (JSG) at the University of Texas at Austin recognized the need for URGE (Unlearning Racism in Geosciences) in our School. Given the benefits of presenting a unified voice to our leadership, we formed one UT Austin ‘Megapod’, with eight ‘podlets’ for smaller virtual meetings. The UT Austin Megapod was 39% Graduate Students, 28% Staff, 18% Faculty, 9% Postdoctoral researchers, and 6% Undergraduates (representating all three JSG Units and some affiliated colleges). We developed a list of anti-racist priorities for our School, resources that will be made available online (e.g., demographic data, safety plans, and a resource map), and key “lessons learned” that collectively form a strategic plan to facilitate discussions with leadership and implement change. The structured program of URGE helped catalyze an inter-unit and inter-rank community effort at the JSG to address our shortcomings in BeAJEDI activities (Belonging, Accessibility, Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion).

Despite being one of the largest geoscience programs in the United States, the JSG community does not reflect the diversity of our state or country. The priorities our Megapod identified as requiring immediate attention are: 1) low racial and ethnic diversity amongst faculty, staff, and graduate students; 2) need for improved recruitment and retention of minoritized undergraduate students; 3) need for improved follow-through and documentation of BeAJEDI activities; 4) need for a stronger sense of community and a culture that fosters communication and understanding across units and ranks (i.e., students, staff, faculty, leadership); 5) improved accessibility and interdisciplinarity of our department and curriculum (e.g., broadening the JSG’s identity and activities beyond traditional geology); 6) better onboarding of students and faculty, particularly minoritized groups; and 7) structural incentives for BeAJEDI activities at all levels. Such efforts require broad buy-in across the school and we plan to leverage the momentum of URGE to continue these necessary conversations and sustain the URGE mission through the coming semester and years.