Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 10-12-2026

Journal / Book Title

Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning

Abstract

In Short

  • Equity-minded practice, developed for higher education by Dr. Estela Mara Bensimon, is ideally suited to aid the academy in meeting the challenges of the moment.

  • Most equity-minded literature focuses on tools to aid individual practitioners. Strategies are needed to help campuses engage in institution-wide equity-minded practice.

  • The Racial Equity and Justice Institute’s Institutional Equity-Minded Indicators offer campuses strategic, measurable, equity-minded goals focused on closing disparate outcomes and supporting the success of all students.

Many campuses are being forced to eliminate or modify their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies due to state prohibitions, while others have engaged in self-censorship in response to the federal government’s anti-DEI actions, including issuing executive orders and the slashing of funding for equity-oriented work (Garces et al., Citation2025). Simultaneously, college students are increasingly diverse and continue to experience disparate outcomes (Gentlewarrior et al., Citation2024; McNair et al., Citation2020), and the barrage of anti-DEI sentiment and legislation increases the likelihood that students will struggle, compounding higher education’s long-standing inability to successfully serve students of color and students from other vulnerable communities (Gupton, Citation2023; Maye, Citation2025). Rather than abandoning DEI efforts in higher education, Kezar and Culver (Citation2025) reminded us that “now is the time to take stock, to reaffirm our commitment to this work, and to take the necessary risks to redesign our approaches, to address the root causes at the root” (p. 3).

Key to this reaffirmation and redesign is holding ourselves accountable to the students we serve. To that end, this article offers a set of institutional equity-minded indicators (IEIs) to help practitioners replace intentions with outcomes, ensure resources are deployed effectively, and track results, moving beyond good faith to proven effectiveness.

DOI

10.1080/00091383.2026.2710579

Rights

© 2026 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Citation

Gentlewarrior, S., Artze-Vega, I., Liera, R., & Rall, R. M. (2026). Meeting the Moment Through Strategic, Measurable Institutional Equity-Minded Indicators. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 58(5), 35–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2026.2710579

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