Marquita Chamblee is the Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer. In this role she is responsible for leading efforts that advance diversity and inclusion across campus and into the broader community. This involves collaborating with Wayne State students, staff, faculty, administration, and alumni as well as community partners across the Detroit metro area to enhance all aspects of diversity and inclusion, which includes: supporting student success, promoting intercultural skill development, enhancing faculty and staff diversity, and strengthening leadership accountability for diversity and institutional equity.
Dr. Chamblee has spent most of her career focused on creating safe, welcoming, supportive spaces for as many different people in as many different settings as possible. This is reflected in 30-plus year career in higher education, during which she has engaged with and served a broad constituency of students – from high school students all the way through Ph.D. candidates – as well as collaborating with and supporting staff, faculty, administrators, and trustees at a variety of institutions. Her primary work has focused on what is now broadly known as diversity and inclusion, though the field has evolved and expanded dramatically since she began her career at Penn State University in the early 1980s.
The work of diversity, inclusion, multicultural education, and community engagement blends relatively seamlessly with her life work and purpose, and she came into it in part as the result of having grown up in a large family with civic-minded, civil rights activist, humanitarian parents. In addition to designing, implementing, and evaluating a number of initiatives, programs, and strategies to enhance diversity and inclusion, she has also developed and taught courses, co-designed educational workshops on issues of diversity and multicultural awareness, and engaged in a wide variety of academic and administrative pursuits.
Prior to joining Wayne State, she served as the Director of the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Multicultural Education (ODIME) at George Mason University. She has also worked as a consultant in the San Francisco Bay area, and on the staff at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. She has held administrative and faculty roles at Michigan State University and Penn State University. Dr. Chamblee received her Ph.D. and Master of Science from Penn State University, and her Bachelor of Science from Purdue University.
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