The overarching goal of OREGON STATE ADVANCE is to serve as a catalyst for advancing the study and practice of equity, inclusion, and justice for women and others from historically underrepresented groups who are faculty in the academy. In order to achieve this goal OREGON STATE ADVANCE designed its objectives, initiatives and programs, and research and evaluation on theoretical frameworks that make sense of systems of oppression and offer alternative visions of equity in the academy. 

Objectives

Progression toward our main goal is guided by three major objectives:

  1. Recruitment and Promotion: Influence academic recruitment and promotion policies and practices to assure equitable, inclusive, and just advancement.
  2. Institutional Climate: Contribute to an institutional climate that reflects a shared value for equity, inclusion, and justice.
  3. Awareness and Action: Provoke faculty and administrators’ personal awareness of difference, power, and discrimination in the academy and actions that contribute to equitable, inclusive, and just treatment. 

Theoretical Application

Systems of oppression theory explains institutions, such as Oregon State University, as contextualized within larger intersecting systems of sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and ageism that reproduce and maintain hierarchies based on gender, race, class, sexual identity, ability, etcetera.

As depicted in the figure below, systems are organized along three reciprocally determined and inter-influential dimensional levels: the institutional, the symbolic, and the individual or personal (Hill Collins, 1993).