When Colgate University decided a few years ago to recast its diversity efforts, it joined a small, but growing, number of schools across the country in taking a new approach to a decades-old challenge of how best to make their schools more appealing to people from all walks of life and more compelling to employers as a good place to recruit

Colgate, a midsize liberal arts college in northwestern New York state, created a high-ranking diversity post with an ambitious mandate to help expand the school’s approach to diversity. It would embrace recruitment, enrollment and retention of students; development and retention of staff; long-term planning; academic programs; and internal and community relations. It would be quite a leap from historical efforts largely run at department levels by individuals with less authority.

“Things here had been done in silos,” says Dr. Keenan Grenell, recruited by Colgate two years ago as its vice president and dean of diversity, a new post at the school that reports directly to its president. “You can’t do those things without some campuswide coordination,” says Grenell, adding that disparate efforts around campus have achieved their goals but not as well as a coordinated campuswide approach may have.

Today, Grenell is working with his colleagues to get through a long to-do list, including a study of campus cultural climate and, separately, the first major evaluation of the school’s affirmative action program since 1997. Grenell is responsible for the school’s affirmative action and equal opportunity compliance programs.

Grenell has spent most of the past decade as part of a legion of educators helping schools take their historical affirmative action programs to a broader level of “inclusiveness.” However, they face myriad challenges, including dissent from people who question the need for such a broad, all-encompassing approach that may give short shrift to the concerns of high-need constituents.

Today’s chief diversity officer (CDO) has an agenda and mission, thanks to expanded anti-discrimination laws, that go beyond race and numbers to cover sexual orientation, older students, military veterans and the disabled. Also, they say, employers are increasingly asking colleges for job candidates who are “culturally competent” and able to function effectively in multicultural environments.