One change that can be made to my syllabus to promote inclusion and equity is to extend deadlines without penalties. I set firm deadlines and will penalize students for lateness if they have not made prior arrangements with me. I try to be flexible when students have issues and ask me for extensions, but many students just feel uncomfortable asking for extensions. I was getting so frustrated with one student this summer who was handing everything in weeks late. Once I deducted points from all her assignments she let me know that she was working multiple jobs to support her family. I just assumed that she was not a serious student, without taking into account that there may be personal reasons for why she wasn’t getting the work done. Maybe, I should have reached out to the student to see if I could help her with anything instead of just deducting points.

A famous statistician that suffered a great deal of racism early in his career is David Blackwell. He became the first African-American tenured faculty member at Berkely. Blackwell is well known for his work in Bayesian probability models and game theory. The Rao-Blackwell theory is named in his honor. You can find more about his life at : David H. Blackwell: A Profile of Inspiration and Perseverance | Statistics at Illinois .