(1) Scope of Work for Equity Audit of Cadet Regulations.docx

U.S Coast Guard Academy’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion Statement of Work Project Title:

Equity Audit of the entire cadet regulations Background:

The U.S. Coast Guard Academy (CGA) contracted with the Center for Urban Education (CUE) from the University of Southern California in 2017-2018 to perform an equity audit of many Academy systems. For CGA’s Vital Signs Report (VSR), CUE and a CGA team consisting of administrators from the Offices of Diversity, Institutional Research, Admissions, and Academic Affairs, as well as a STEM faculty member, worked with CGA offices to collect data from the past three to five academic years pertaining to four broad areas of cadet success: Admissions, Military and Cadet Division, Academics, and Athletics. Although CUE’s scorecard process does not usually include a separate analysis of gender equity, CUE has, at CGA’s request, included in CGA’s Vital Signs representations of the same data disaggregated by gender. The VSR uncovered a number of equity gaps at the Academy, in particular impacting our cadets who identify as African American.

Statement of Work:

Our leadership development framework consists of three major components, military, academic, and athletic. For a cadet’s military development we rely on a document known as the cadet regulations, or cadet regs for short. The cadet regs are a set of guidelines by which cadets must operate. If a cadet fails to adhere to the terms contained in the cadet regulations they can be sanctioned and/or removed from the corps of cadets. The CGA team and the CUE team data revealed disparities that warranted subsequent attention and exploration within the cadet regs. Of particular urgency is the finding that Black/African-American cadets’ receive a disproportionately high share of disciplinary sanctions: this cadet group was overrepresented in both Class I and Class II Offenses for all three of the years measured. The same was true when looking at suitability for service probation placements for two of these years. The VSR also noted that Asian, Black/African-American, Latinx, and multi-racial cadets were also underrepresented— sometimes considerably so—in the distribution of Silver Star awards (an award for academic excellence).

CUE recommended that CGA evaluate all of its processes that may be vulnerable to implicit bias, citing the Cadet Conduct System as an example.

The Cadet Conduct and Discipline system, which delegates authority to first, second, and third class cadets “to place any other cadet on report (whether senior, same class, or junior) for Class II and III infractions of the regulations” is particularly vulnerable to racial profiling and bias if cadets have not undergone training to exercise their authority in accordance with the principles and practices of equitymindedness.

To this end, we are seeking an individual or a group of individuals who can review the cadet regs, cover to cover, looking for overt or covert inequities that may disproportionately impact cadets of color and women. We are seeking partners who can employ a critical lens, for example Critical Race Theory, and combine that with an ethnographic research approach when conducting this review. The Coast Guard Academy is its own unique society with its own culture. We are interested in having an outside entity immerse itself in our culture via the cadet regs and by meeting with a cross section of our cadets and studying the way we operate using a critical framework. While we seek outside and unbiased perspective on our cadet regs we also see the value in having at least one member of the evaluating team have some military experience. In the end, we seek to better understand ourselves such that we can identify barriers to participation and opportunities for success and reduce and/or eliminate them. The leadership development model at the Academy is hard by design, but it should not be any harder or easier because of your gender or racial identity. We seek to eliminate race and gender-based inequality. From our partner we seek a cover to cover review of the cadet regs, in conjunction with meeting with a cross section of cadets, followed by a report clearly documenting areas of concern with suggestions for correcting the problems.

Timeline:

Desired skill sets

Equity-minded Culturally competent Diverse teams At least one team member who has military experience Good writing skills Good and consistent verbal communication Detail orientated Good collaborators

Work history Please provide list of previous clients.

For more information contact:

Aram deKoven, PhD United States Coast Guard Academy Chief Diversity Officer Office of Inclusion and Diversity, Director (sid) 15 Mohegan Avenue Hamilton Hall 131 New London, CT 06320-8103 860.701.6930 Aram.dekoven@uscga.edu