Community Standards

The Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture is committed to shared community standards. Following a participatory process, the department crafted the following statement which is guiding all of our actions:

In Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, we acknowledge injustice exists and we are committed to creating a community that welcomes, includes, and empowers all our faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students, and guests. We value everyone — individuals of all races, gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, religious beliefs, nationalities and ancestry, genetic makeup, marital or parental status, abilities, and veteran status. We honor, respect, and learn from our differences. We speak out against words and actions that cause harm and consider it our duty to promote the voices of underrepresented individuals within our department, the university, and our community. We design our policies to limit structural inequities.  We learn from our mistakes with humility and a renewed commitment to constant improvement.  We champion these ideas in all that we do, both on and off campus, to support our Horticulture and Landscape Architecture mission.

The department has an active Community Standards Committee that is continuously working to make the departmental climate more inclusive and welcoming. In recent years, remodeling in the Horticulture building has created gender neutral bathrooms and a lactation room. The department regularly holds “lunch and learn” sessions where food and information about various cultures around the world is shared and celebrated.