Since taking the position as the inaugural vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at Chapman University in the summer of 2021, Reginald Chhen Stewart has focused much of his attention on hiring a team to work alongside him in the Office of DEI and getting acclimated with students, faculty, staff and trustees within the university. 

His position is one that provides support and leadership for a broad spectrum of equity, inclusion and diversity initiatives at the university.

Stewart first sat down in person with The Panther at the beginning of the fall 2021 semester, his first semester at Chapman, to share his background, qualifications and his goals for the university from a senior staff standpoint.

Now, with about one year and 10 months of experience at Chapman under his belt, The Panther sat down with Stewart for a second time to learn about the accomplishments he’s made so far, what he hopes to achieve next school year and how he and his newly-constructed Office of DEI team have been fostering inclusivity among the Chapman community.

Stewart's answers have been lightly edited for clarity and stylistic standards. 

Q: With this being the first time that a DEI position has been a part of Chapman’s senior staff, what kind of impact do you think this position has had on Chapman’s community so far?

A: If you’re doing the DEI job right at the vice president level, people won’t even notice that you're doing it. That’s how you know you're doing it right. For example, May 1 just happened and the Asian American Pacific Islander heritage banners went up around campus. To me, I’m standing there, I'm smiling and I'm taking a picture of it, but what people don’t realize is how much time and energy went into it. You have to come up with the right art designs for each unique heritage month and set aside the amount of money to pay for it. 

If you think about the first-year students on campus, they will always have gone to school with heritage month banners. So to them, it is totally normal, but for those of us who have been around for even a year or more, we know these banners are brand new. 

This position helps Chapman understand that individual demographics and communities need different types of support. So you can’t just say, ‘We’ve hired a VP of DEI. We’re done,’ which is why there is now a Director of Black Excellence and Achievement, a Director of Latinx Achievement, an Executive Director and Assistant Director for the Cross-Cultural Center (CCC) and first-generation programs, and currently, we’re interviewing for the Director of LGBTQ Pride and Achievement. 

The goal is to bring practitioners onto campus to foster this work.

The impact is, if we’re doing it right, the students here will have a much more enjoyable experience and a stronger sense of belonging to their institution. We have implemented a cognitive culture shift of what it means to do DEI work, and it’s not one size fits all. This work is constantly changing and evolving. 

Q: With it having been a year and 10 months into you taking on this role so far, what steps, initiatives and accomplishments have you already taken to ensure that Chapman’s campus is both equitable and inclusive?

A: The steps start with personnel, the contact people. It also starts with recognizing that we are in the business of working with people and that means relationship building and trust building. No matter how sincere and how well-intended you are, you have to be mindful of your presence in other communities and in being humble enough to say, ‘I might not be the person that needs to deliver this message at this time to this particular population.’ 

It is difficult to hire every demographic and every combination, but in trying to be strategic with who you hire, you are able to hire people who are multifaceted and can do a lot of things. 

The number one priority for me was getting the right people to help the Office of DEI manage our initiatives. Then after that, my priority was setting the budget priorities and making sure that enough funding was going to the correct places.

One of the things we did as a department was determine whose new bust comes on campus. Then, if a donor comes along and says, ‘I want to pay for a bust,’ we can give them a list to choose from. These are busts of people who are conservative, they’re liberal, they’re people of color, they’re all over the place. It’s better than just telling a donor, ‘Tell us who you want a bust of,’ because that could skew the university in a direction very quickly if we do it that way. 

In this past year, we’ve unveiled Nadia Murad, Colin Powell and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and we just unveiled Condoleezza Rice. Therefore, being mindful of how we approach this work is a really valuable asset. In just a year and 10 months, I think that’s a pretty significant revision of the way the university makes decisions. 

Q: Throughout your time in this role, what impression has Chapman made on you, and how do you think this past year went in terms of encouraging DEI initiatives on campus?

A: We moved these initiatives in the direction that we knew we could move them in. This year is particularly important because DEI and higher education have been under assault. The difference is that Chapman understands the value of what we’re trying to build, which is a community of an amazing collection of students from all over the world. To do that, it’s not going to have one appeal. You’re going to have to have multiple different things that appeal to different people. 

What makes me feel like I belong on a college campus may be slightly different than someone else and trying to find the right combination of things is important. It’s also important to remember that you’re not always going to get it exactly right. You have to be humble enough to be willing to press that reset button.

Q: How did you know what steps to take first and in which order to take them when you began your position?

A: It really comes down to the data that we received in relation to Chapman’s surrounding community and the university’s demographics. The university is adjacent to Santa Ana and Anaheim, where there is this massive Latinx population. Therefore, we should turn some energy towards that population — dedicated energy. 

With Chapman also hoping to become a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), other HSIs and emerging HSIs all generally have a point person on campus that manages the efforts and engagement with Latinx students, staff and faculty. Clearly, I knew that we were going to need a Director of Latinx Achievement from the moment that I walked in the door.

I’ve been doing this line of work for a long time. So, a position like the Director of Latinx Achievement may be new to Chapman, but after you’ve put together so many thousand-piece puzzles, you begin to understand the order and the process. That’s why that position came about first. 

To continue, I came into my position right after some of the real duress that the Black students were experiencing at Chapman, so I clearly knew we were going to need to have a director focusing on those experiences, which then began the hiring process for the Director of Black Excellence and Achievement. After that, at that time, neither the CCC nor the Promising Futures First-Generation Programs (PFP) were actually in the DEI unit, so some of that work was having to move those programs over to the unit and hire personnel to run them. 

I knew that I also wanted to have the Director of LGBTQ Pride and Achievement, but it was just a matter of working on prioritizing everything in a cohesive way. The Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is also in the process of hiring for the Director of Asian American Studies for the Asian American studies minor, and it’s all part of what we’re trying to do as a university. 

Q: What are your next steps for the upcoming summer and for next school year? 

A:Doing this gets very exhausting because every new person who gets hired has to get acclimated to the system we’re using, and it’s tenuous because if I don’t hire the right person, they can come in and really upset the balance of the team that we’re creating. 

Over the summer, our office will be spending time looking at what worked and what didn’t work this past year. My priority is going to be getting a better understanding of how much it costs for everything this year and work on setting budgets and priorities for the fall term and what we want the upcoming semester to look like. 

I want to also spend more time this summer working on Chapman’s faculty diversity initiative because for the most part, we’ve been really student-facing by design, but we also need to turn our energy towards the faculty as well. 

Q: Could you speak more about the faculty diversity initiative and your plans for that?

A: With the faculty diversity initiative, it comes down to understanding the unique challenges with diversifying faculty at Chapman in particular, with one of these challenges being the geography of where the university is located. It is very expensive to live in Orange, so even if we do find people who are really strong and talented, it’s hard to poach them from the Midwest and other places where the cost of living is cheaper. 

Before beginning my position, Chapman put $1.5 million into faculty diversity recruitment, so some of my work will be taking a look at that program to see how successful it was and what we need to do with it for the upcoming year to increase its success. 

Q: Throughout your time at Chapman so far, what is the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

A: I have learned a lot about Chapman’s systems because I’m coming from much bigger universities that most certainly have more red tape​​. At Chapman, implementing things takes a bit longer because it is a smaller school. 

Therefore, a lot of things are done more interpersonally here, and it is actually more difficult to learn a system like that because you have to learn who are the right people for each different thing you want to implement. I’ve found that it’s not as easy to really get into a flow because I’m focusing on learning a system that I’m not too familiar with. That did come as a surprise to me, and I’m learning more and more as each day goes on. 

Q: How have you engaged with the students at Chapman so far?

From my time here so far, I’ve learned that the students at Chapman are very appreciative to be here. I’m used to coming from big public universities where there’s a lot of students who are just there because that’s what they’ve been told to do after completing high school. 

I enjoy working with the students at Chapman because they seem to have a real appreciation for their opportunity to study here, and that translates into the level of respect that they give back to the faculty and administration. I think it’s definitely much more rewarding in that regard to work here, and it has been a pleasant surprise that I’ve been enjoying. 

Q: Since your position is inaugural, could you speak more towards how you constructed your role to best benefit the Chapman community?

A: Before beginning here, I installed this same position at the University of Nevada and then at Iowa State University. The positions that are inaugural are the most appealing to me because you’re not really coming in to do damage control for what somebody did before. You’re able to work much more autonomously. 

Yes, the players are different, the funding sources are different, the policies are different and the community is different. However, the reality is that this job is remarkably similar among all universities. My responsibility was as much to help the university understand what it means to have a Vice President of DEI and operationalize Chapman’s diversity mission. 

It’s understanding what people want in the community and then figuring out how to give that back in a way that will benefit everyone. 

Q: How has it been constructing, putting together and working with your team in the Office of DEI?

A: For me, it’s been a joy. I think one of the most joyous parts of the job is to sit down at this computer, write that job description, have it posted online, have all these applicants come down and then eventually, finding the one person that manifested what I had envisioned for the role. Then, you’re able to give them the tools they need and let them shine. It’s a really privileged way to work when you get to build your own team.

For example, when recruiting for the Director of Black Excellence and Achievement, once I had the position written, in my mind I believed that the perfect person for the job was going to be a person that’s doing a version of this job somewhere else. I don’t want to have to explain to the person that gets the job how to go about engaging Black students. 

I needed someone who already gets it. When I was going through all the applications, there was one that really caught my attention, and as I kept working through these different rounds, that specific application kept making it to the next round. Ultimately, I got to a place where I knew that this was the person that could help (the Office of DEI’s) vision manifest, and that was Misty Levingston. 

If you think of a block of marble, the art is inside the marble. You don’t make the art; you get rid of what doesn’t belong, and the art will appear. That’s the way that I see building this team. The goal is to allow the art to appear –– the team to appear. I just have to be the kind of person who people want to come work with by being ethical, approachable, trustworthy and honest, where I will tell you if I don’t think something can be accomplished at a certain point in time. 

Having people who trust that leadership style is very important in ensuring that the team is able to work together in an effective manner.