Our History

The Diversity Statement reads as follows:

"A goal of Saginaw Valley State University is to prepare the professional workforce and leadership for its primary service region and beyond.  The University is a portal of opportunity through which high school graduates, with potential to succeed, prepare themselves for more rewarding careers, more interesting lives and more effective service to others.  For these reasons, the University must undertake extraordinary efforts in the years ahead to serve students from diverse racial and ethnic communities.  It must also better prepare all of its students to work with, understand and appreciate the diversity of peoples and ideas that comprise and enrich American culture.

Such extraordinary efforts must focus on achieving a greater diversity among the faculty and staff as well as the student body and all other groups the University supports or serves.  This will require efforts to expand the pool of available candidates in hiring decisions, to provide genuine consideration for a greater variety of relevant experiences and credentials to achieve the University’s board goals.  It will require special recruitment and outreach efforts for culturally diverse students and the continued improvement of services to assist these students and promote their success. Beyond these efforts, the University must reaffirm its commitment to equality of opportunity by creating and nurturing, by leadership and example, an environment of genuine understanding and appreciation for differences among peoples.  While within the University there are and should be certain shared values, a diversity of ideas and perspectives must be encouraged.

The President of the University is directed, consistent with the University’s academic standards, to pursue aggressively the development and support of those programs and activities which will best accomplish these objectives."