Inclusive Astronomy Nashville Recommendations

The AAS has committed to work toward becoming an ever more diverse and inclusive community. As a part of that commitment, we are pleased to announce that the Nashville Recommendations for Inclusive Astronomy are now available on the AAS wiki. The wiki serves as a permanent, living archive of the recommendations. It also provides a page where individuals, institutions, and organizations may visibly register their endorsement of, and commit to implement, specific recommendations.

The Nashville Recommendations resulted from the Inclusive Astronomy conference held at Vanderbilt University in 2015. In 2016, following a special session at the 227th AAS meeting summarizing the recommendations, the vision statement in the recommendations was endorsed by AAS Council.

The recommendations include many ways for individuals, institutions, and organizations to commit to specific implementations, at multiple levels of granularity. For example, one concrete recommendation— that astronomy graduate programs reduce reliance on GRE scores for admissions decisions — was also the subject of an open letter to the community from the AAS past president. We are aware of several astronomy graduate programs that have now committed to this recommendation; we invite these departments to register their commitment to this recommendation and any others on the wiki.

The Nashville Recommendations include many other concrete actions, big and small, through which we can commit together to make astronomy the scientific profession that leads by example in becoming a truly diverse and inclusive professional community.