ACE Committee Mission Statement:
The CU Denver Economics department ACE Committee is committed to fostering a culture that is welcoming to all. We will work to identify issues faced by students, staff, and faculty, especially those in groups that are less well represented in Economics. Further, we will identify best practices to eliminate these issues, and communicate these strategies to the entire department, as well as benchmark the progress we make using data. Our ultimate goal is to further access to the economics profession. To achieve this goal, the committee’s work will include, but is not limited to, increasing the number of students taking economics courses and being mindful in our hiring and retention practices.
ACE Committee Work:
To date, the ACE committee has collected data on our student body and we are actively working on changing our teaching practices, moving towards a more comprehensive picture of what the economics profession is. In addition, we have hosted several events for students with the goal of encouraging students who might not otherwise study economics to do so. This work is not solely on changes that affect our student body; we are currently and have in the past worked on issues affecting our faculty. For example, we moved our seminar time to accommodate childcare needs, disseminated information about bias on student evaluations of faculty teaching and reduced our emphasis on these types of evaluations in our tenure and promotion decisions, as well as formalizing language about how parental leave should be treated in tenure and promotion decisions, which was eventually adopted by the entire College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at CU Denver. We look forward to continuing this important work.
Economics Department ACE Committee Members:
- Chloe East, committee chair
- Enoch Chen
- Nick Golding
- Hani Mansour
- Kyle Montanio
- Andrea Velasquez