Kapani’s goal: Breathing life into a vision

Ask Seema Kapani for her assessment of UW–Madison’s efforts to create a more welcoming and diverse campus, and she’ll tell you about 20 years of both exhilarating successes and intense frustrations.

She can relate personal stories of excitement, the times when she has watched participants in her diversity education seminars turn into powerful allies for positive social change. But she’s also quick to remember painful moments, such as when she was spat upon and told she should go back to her native country of India.

“Candidly, we’re far, far, far away from where we need to be,” says Kapani, who has spent the past five years as diversity education coordinator for the Equity and Diversity Resource Center. “We have a fantastic vision here, but we need to put wheels under it to make it real, to breathe life into it.”

Kapani is the UW–Madison recipient of the 2002 UW System Women of Color Award. Sponsored by the UW System Women’s Studies Consortium, Office of Diversity and Development, and Office of Women’s Issues, the award recognizes 16 women for their contributions to their campuses and communities.

Through her work, Kapani has designed and facilitated professional development programs focusing on equity and diversity issues for faculty, staff and students. She has directed the Leadership Institute Program, as well as Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity seminars designed to help faculty and staff to develop strategies for building inclusive curricula, classrooms and multicultural pedagogies.

To create a healthier climate, Kapani says she advocates transformation on the personal, interpersonal and institutional levels. She also stresses the need for risk-taking and concrete changes at each of these levels.

One of the easiest ways for members of the campus community to help improve climate is by modeling the kind of changes they’d like to see in the world and exemplifying them in their own lives, she says.

“We hardly examine inequities at the institutional level,” she adds. “Who does the institutional culture privilege? And who does it leave behind? We need to identify it and name it. Because what we don’t know, we cannot change.”

Kapani says it’s laudable that UW–Madison administrators have made campus climate a key priority, but a larger commitment would be signaled by increasing resources for diversity education programs and by creating mechanisms for monitoring progress.

“People worry that they’re going to lose something by embracing diversity of perspectives,” she says. “But this tapestry can grow even richer. It doesn’t negate one to enrich another.”