Warren Scherer is the Assistant Dean of Students, and the Director of Gender and Sexuality Campus Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He leads an array of campus-wide services that focus on the ideas of equity and intercultural campus initiatives for minoritized students. In our conversation today, he shares the perspective of what it means to do diversity, equity, and inclusion work at the university level. We talk about some of the various student populations that should be considered when creating policy, questions one should ask themselves when thinking about policy implementation, and why this work is so important in higher education.

Topics in this episode

• Experiences he’s had which brought him to DEI work
• The impact mentors have had on his life, and how it inspired him to want to be that for others as well
• Asking the questions: What populations is a policy advantageous to? Or which populations will this policy be disadvantageous to in its implementation?
• The various student populations that may be impacted by policy
• Questioning convention. Just because we’ve done this in a certain way for a very long time, doesn’t mean it has to continue to be done this way.
• Being an advocate and creating pathways for other young professionals.
• The importance of qualitative and quantitative data, and including others in the conversation in order to best interpret that data
• DEI work and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic at the university level
• 3 Free ways to include DEI work:
  • Being transparent
  • Bringing people in
  • Asking questions

Contact Info

• Email: warren.scherer@wisc.edu
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/warrenascherer/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/warrenascherer
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/warren.scherer.5

Thank you for participating in Uplighting Impact. I was so delighted to have Warren on as a guest and as a friend to look up to. I’m so glad that we have so many young people and young professionals who are going to be able to learn from this work as they grow into the wonderful leaders that they’re going to be. If we continue to be transparent and use our social capital to ask questions and to show up with this perspective, we can completely change the way we are including other people in the world, and make it better.