About the ICEO

MIT’s Institute Community & Equity Office

The Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO) builds community through care, education, restorative practices, and programming that embraces, celebrates, and helps increase MIT’s diversity in all its forms—making the Institute an ever-greater magnet for talent from around the world.    

By stewarding MIT’s values and their interconnections, the ICEO helps create the conditions for every individual to do their best work, and an environment where each member of the community has a strong sense they belong at MIT. The ICEO is a coordinating hub for inclusive excellence and community building at MIT.

MIT Building 10 Dome

Our community

MIT’s on-campus population is made up of roughly 4,600 undergraduate students, 7,200 graduate students, 16,000 staff, 1,500 postdocs, and 1,000 faculty; Institute alumni number approximately 147,000. We come from all 50 US states and every country in the world, and we represent a broad range of faiths, races, ethnicities, ages, political views, and socioeconomic backgrounds. MIT’s sense of community is defined by our values and how all of us treat each other and by the culture and climate that result from our interactions.

To achieve the sense of community we deserve, we must look inward to understand what we can do now, we must look back to learn from our successes and our missteps, and we must look forward to achieve what we aspire to become. If we are not trying to create a culture of inclusive excellence in which all members of the community can do their best work, now and in the future, we are not fulfilling MIT’s mission.

Our work

How have the particular challenges and opportunities of our own backgrounds shaped our paths and attitudes, our advantages and disadvantages? How have other people’s experiences affected them, and how do these factors play out in how we live and work together?

As an organization, the ICEO is led by Karl Reid ’84, SM ’85, MIT’s first Vice President for Equity and Inclusion. He and the ICEO aim to create and institutionalize policies, systems, and behaviors that promote equity, value differences of opinion and origin, and establish conditions for productive disagreement that unite all of us in service to the Institute’s mission. To this end, the ICEO organizes its actions around three strategic priorities:

  • Belonging: MIT will cultivate a community in which people feel connected to each other, share a sense of purpose, and support each individual’s freedom to be themselves and respectfully express their views. By encouraging empathy, civil discourse, inclusion, and engagement, we will build on our historic strengths as a problem-solving institution and contribute to society’s collective well-being. 
  • Achievement: MIT will make equity central to how opportunities are presented and assessments are conducted for all members of the community while ensuring the highest standards of excellence. We will minimize barriers to achievement and chart equitable pathways to success for everyone.
  • Composition: MIT can only fulfill its mission by serving as a magnet for a wide range of talented people. The composition of our community, and of our leadership, should reflect a commitment to diversity. Establishing objectives, defining steps for achieving them, and improving processes for collecting more detailed identity data will empower us to see ourselves more clearly and make progress.

We have adopted these terms—belonging, achievement, and composition—because we believe they better reflect how MIT defines community, its focus, and its values than the more commonly used inclusion, equity, and diversity.

Our organization

We believe that form follows function. Our organization is structured to both deliver services and programming and to convene people, resources, and systems from around MIT to reflect our mission. To that end, the ICEO offers programming across four distinct but overlapping areas: 

  • Community Building: Includes MIT Values programs, the Department Support Program, community and belonging grants, Random Acts of Kindness programming, and other community activities such as Pi Day and MITHenge.
  • Community Networks: Includes the MLK Visiting Scholars and Professors Program, the annual MLK celebration and leadership awards, Employee Resource Groups, and a new effort to create, support, and build upon cultural events for the whole community.
  • Community Learning: A developing domain that includes training, convening and operationalizing community engagement practices at MIT, as well as the coordination of, and capacity building for programs devoted to community dialogue. This also includes the creation and deployment of a digital repository of community engagement research.
  • Community Relationships: A new area, in partnership with Institute Discrimination Harassment and Response (IDHR), in which we are developing programs that help community members develop such skills as active listening, empathy building, conflict management, and collective accountability. 

Within the ICEO, there is staff leadership and accountability for each portfolio of programs, and there is centralized support for administration, assessment and evaluation, communications, and resource development. This flexible structure allows the ICEO to continue its participation in new initiatives as they arise, and it allows us to sustain our commitment to advancing the Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition.