Originally Published in the Stone Center Newsletter on March 12, 2025
At the Stone Center, what we do is determined by our mission: to produce cutting-edge research on social inequality, especially wealth inequality; to train the next generation of inequality scholars; and to build data infrastructure and increase data accessibility. How we advance these goals is shaped by our values.
In January 2023, President Ono announced six core values of the University of Michigan: integrity, respect, inclusion, equity, diversity, and innovation. In recent months, some of these values — inclusion, equity, and diversity — have come under attack. In this moment, I believe it is more important than ever to ground our actions in our values. Our commitment to inclusion, equity, and diversity is core to our pursuit of excellence. Equitable opportunities help ensure that innovative ideas are nurtured and pursued, no matter who they come from. A diverse and inclusive intellectual community allows us to strengthen our research by ensuring the questions we ask and the methods we pursue to answer them aren’t constrained by too narrow a range of perspectives.
To be meaningful, our values must translate into action. President Ono urged that “(The values) have to be practiced. They can’t just be on a seal or on a website. It has to be really evident in the decisions, large and small, that each of us make every day.” At the Stone Center, we aim to live our values through our activities and decision-making processes. To help foster a diverse scholarly community, we participate in the Institute for Social Research’s Junior Professional Researcher program, a two-year research position that provides recent college graduates from backgrounds underrepresented in research the opportunity to launch a career in the social sciences. We follow in the footsteps of Michigan’s Rackham Merit Fellowship Program, which supports students with excellent academic achievement and potential from a broad array of life experiences and perspectives — we use the same eligibility and evaluative criteria as one component of selection for our Emerging Inequality Scholar Awards for doctoral students. To make our Visiting Fellowship program accessible to early-career faculty regardless of caregiving and other responsibilities that might prevent someone from moving to Ann Arbor for a year, we offer a non-residency option. We use scoring rubrics for hiring and fellowship selections so that candidates are evaluated fairly and consistently. To provide an inclusive space for all voices in our decision-making and offerings as a center, our community engages in participatory budgeting.
Like all institutions, the Stone Center will at times fall short of fully living into its values. When we do, I hope you will hold us accountable.
We do not know how specific programs and policies may change in the coming years. But commitment to these values remains central to our pursuit of innovative research and the intellectual development of our exceptional community of scholars. We will continue to stand for these core values of the University of Michigan. We invite you to stand with us.
Best,
Sasha
Alexandra Killewald, Director
Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID)
