Our Community
Muhlenberg College is committed to creating a welcoming and inclusive campus.
As an institution and as individual members of a campus community, we believe it is our shared responsibility to build and support an environment for living, learning, and working at Muhlenberg in which everyone is welcomed as their full selves.
Key Partners in This Work
Explore some college offices that work closely on student access and inclusion.
Equity and Title IX
Ensuring compliance with both Title VI, which protects against discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, and Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination
Disability Services
Ensuring that qualified students with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations to establish equal access to programs, services, and activities
MOSAIC
Cultivating spaces where social consciousness develops, connections deepen, and diverse understandings are shared
Religious and Spiritual Life
Supporting and engaging students of all faith and non-faith traditions and empowering students in their individual growth and identity formation
Muhlenberg College Statement on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging
Muhlenberg College’s mission to prepare individuals to be thoughtful leaders and serve meaningfully in a pluralistic and increasingly globalized world requires both individual and collective responsibility toward achieving the goals of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
Muhlenberg College recognizes and values intersecting identities including, but not limited to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, age, socioeconomic class, nationality, language, and citizenship status that are integral to who we are and how we experience the world and each other. This diversity enriches our campus community, is fundamental to who we aspire to be, and calls for each of us to engage with one another in ways that demonstrate awareness of and respect for these identities. Together we must continually strive toward building a campus where differences are welcomed, respected, and celebrated and each individual feels a sense of inclusion and belonging.
Our community seeks to support individuals from historically marginalized groups, acknowledging that some identities have been and continue to be advantaged by power and privilege at the costs of others, by creating access to opportunities that will enable them to thrive personally and professionally. In parallel, we strive to understand, acknowledge, and redress the harm and injustice resulting from these inequalities whenever they occur within our community. The success of our institution is inextricable from the success of every individual, and to achieve this we must persistently, vigorously, and collectively work toward diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
To this end, we commit to:
Build and retain an increasingly diverse body of faculty, staff, students, and trustees
Intentionally work to build relationships and a sense of community across diverse identities and perspectives
Identify the different needs of individuals and meet them in an effective, equitable, accessible, and timely manner in order to ensure that everyone on campus is able to succeed and thrive
Make visible all work that faculty, staff, students, and alumni do to enrich and uplift a diverse campus life
Challenge and confront any and all forms of identity-based bias and discrimination
Develop and implement inclusive and anti-racist curricular and co-curricular programming that foregrounds human diversity and the experience and perspectives of historically marginalized groups
Support and uplift the work of affinity groups that seek to create empowering spaces for people from marginalized groups
Recognize the knowledge and experience that exists within diverse Allentown communities and intentionally work together toward common goals
Continuously build our cultural awareness, skills, and capacity to engage in this work and provide sufficient support to do so
Assess and report progress, build regular strategic plans in collaboration with and based on feedback from the Muhlenberg community, and hold ourselves accountable for this work
These commitments guide the actions of each individual at Muhlenberg and our collective strategies for creating a more just community. We recognize that this work is often difficult and ever-evolving and that meaningful transformation requires that each of us be committed to working toward these goals.
Approved by the Muhlenberg College Board of Trustees on January 28, 2023.