Laura Driscoll began leading diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at Sargent in 2018 and has worked to establish the college as a leader in the field.

“We have a pretty special community at Sargent,” says Driscoll, a clinical assistant professor of physical therapy. “Most of the people are active healthcare providers who have a moral compass pointed toward equity.” That, Driscoll adds, has made it easier to enact change.

As director of faculty diversity and inclusion, Driscoll is helping the college address DEI holistically. That includes reviewing graduate admissions processes and revising the core curriculum. Faculty have been taking advantage of new BU DEI programs, and students are driving challenging conversations.

Driscoll and Vincent Stephens, associate dean for diversity and inclusion at BU’s College of Arts & Sciences, conducted a DEI strategic planning session in September 2022, out of which came plans for the college’s Inclusion Catalyst Committee. Stephens and Driscoll presented their work at the 2023 NCORE (National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in Higher Education). “To be able to have Sargent in a place like this within higher ed, looking at how we can do this in the right way, is really exciting,” Driscoll says of the conference.

Inside Sargent spoke with Driscoll about the college’s progress in creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive school.

Inside Sargent: What is your goal as director of faculty diversity and inclusion?

Laura Driscoll: We want our healthcare workforce to reflect our community, and in allied health, it currently doesn’t. It’s still a very predominantly white space—and actually, it’s mostly white women. We need to be thinking about student recruitment, admissions, and support for students when they get here, and faculty and staff recruitment and retention in different ways.

What do you think Sargent’s biggest success has been thus far?

The removal of the GRE requirement in 2019 is one. Even publishing an average GRE score on a website deters people from applying. Just by removing the GRE, we’ve increased the diversity of our applicant pool. Holistic admissions is an evolution. The removal of the GRE felt huge, but that was just a starting point.

What does a holistic admissions process look like?

We’ve changed how we’re ranking and grading applications, and we’re training people to look at them in the least biased way. In physical therapy, typically we required letters of recommendation, essays, grades, and life experiences. The faculty decided what we were looking for in people’s personalities, and we favor a holistic view over a quantitative score. We also de-emphasized the big essay because you don’t need to be a writer to be a physical therapist—and oftentimes people with more privilege have lots of help with those essays. We now also ask applicants to write short answers to questions targeting the skills and personality traits that we’re looking for. And we pay for an online interview service, so we’ve removed the financial barrier of flying to Boston.

You mentioned the goal of making the allied health professions more diverse—what can people already in these professions do?

White people must be engaged in this work, period. There’s been a lot of work to allow faculty to have these conversations, to give space to make mistakes and to recognize that we are learning together.

We also have faculty who have been working on their own skills. Faculty from Sargent were chosen for the first cohort of BU’s Designing Antiracism Curricula Fellowship and the first BU Inclusive Pedagogy Institute. That was awesome because then they brought all of that knowledge back to the rest of us.

So much attention in diversity and inclusion work is focused on race, but Sargent has also introduced Disability Visibility [Alice Wong, ed., Knopf Doubleday, 2020] to the undergraduate core curriculum. How do you approach inclusion holistically?

My core belief is that there’s no hierarchy to oppression. Whether you’re looking through a disability lens or an antiracist lens, it’s all the same concepts of seeing people where they are, providing them what they need to succeed, and making sure you’re trying to understand difference and not assimilate. The root of disability is society thinking somebody’s better or stronger or more important than somebody else—it’s the same core principles in racism.

Sargent now has a Social Justice Learning Club—what inspired its creation?

This started in 2020 when PT students were supposed to be in their clinical internships that had been canceled by COVID. We were thinking of opportunities to give to them to stay engaged, and there were a couple of students who wanted to focus on social justice issues. It started on Zoom, as a brave space for some real discussion about racism. It grew from there.

What else is happening at the student level?

They’re brilliant and they have all the ideas, so I’ve just been mentoring and helping to connect them to the right people. There’s one student who got grant funding for a textbook lending library. And all the professional programs have student organizations [such as Diverse-OT]. Diversity and inclusion isn’t the main mission of all of them, but everybody’s focused on that right now.