Dear Colleagues,
I write to let you know that Elizabeth Conklin, our AVP for Institutional Equity, Title IX and ADA Coordinator recently told me that she has accepted a new position at Yale University and will leave UConn this summer. Elizabeth will become Yale’s inaugural Associate Vice President for Institutional Equity, Access, and Belonging. This is a new position at Yale with a broad and complex scope of responsibility.
While I am happy for Elizabeth as she advances her already impressive career, I am acutely aware that her departure is a major loss for UConn. She came to UConn in 2010 and assumed her current role the following year. I am pleased that Elizabeth will remain here at UConn through July 31 and will help guide this important transition as we undertake a national search for this role.
Throughout her time at UConn, Elizabeth has worked closely with a wide range of colleagues in an effort to create a well-coordinated and effective structural framework across the institution aimed at assuring institutional equity and inclusion for all members of the campus community. At the same time, she worked to build a trusted, efficient and fair process to respond to concerns and complaints of discrimination and harassment.
This has meant simultaneously taking proactive measures aimed at enhancing the culture and preventing discrimination and harassment while also building structures to respond appropriately, fairly and sensitively to concerns and complaints.
Some of her achievements include:
- Significantly restructuring the OIE organizational model organization chart and staffing levels to provide greater clarity to the University community about OIE’s five distinct areas of focus and to deliver more comprehensive, responsive, efficient and effective services to the campus community.
- Overseeing Title IX compliance during an incredibly dynamic, challenging and changing environment during the past 10 years surrounding sexual misconduct on college campus. This has meant ensuring that UConn is undertaking proactive, coordinated prevention strategies to eliminate sexual misconduct on our campuses paired with overseeing an effective, trauma-informed response to incidents that do occur.
- Created new external-facing materials to aid the campus community in accessing our services including www.titleix.uconn.edu, a website that is among the very best in the nation in this area.
- She cofounded, with Wesleyan and Yale Title IX Coordinators, the Connecticut Title IX Coordinator Coalition.
- Merging OIE’s administrative operations with UConn Health in 2016. She aligned the institutional approach and infrastructure for equity and inclusion while considering UConn Health’s unique needs and built new relationships, committees and programs. This included creating and chairing the Patient Discrimination Working Group – an interdisciplinary group that created new policy and procedures to guide practitioner response to discrimination and harassment from patients, guests and visitors in the clinical environment.
- Streamlined multiple separate, outdated policies into updated, clearer, compliant and more forward-thinking policies, most notably the Policy Against Discrimination, Harassment and Related Interpersonal Violence.
- Finally, she and her team have significantly decreased case processing timelines and increased case investigation efficiencies over the years.
After Elizabeth departs on July 31, Sarah Chipman, who currently serves as Director of Investigations/Deputy Title IX Coordinator, will serve in this role on an interim basis.
We thank Elizabeth for her extraordinary service to UConn over the last decade. Please join me in congratulating Elizabeth and in wishing her well.
Tom
For more information, contact: President's Office at president@uconn.edu