Strategies for Increasing Faculty Diversity

Deborah Nolan
University of California, Berkeley

At the January 25, 2001 meeting, Working Toward Gender Equity in the Academy, faculty, students and staff from the UC System gathered to discuss strategies to turn around the recent decline in the rate of hiring of women and minority faculty since the passage of California Prop 209 and UC Regents resolution SP-1. Gathered here is a list of these suggestions. They are assembled from keynote speeches, question and answer periods, panel discussions, break-out group sessions, campus CCSW reports, and conference feedback forms. Some of these ideas are already implemented or are about to be implemented on the Berkeley campus, and others are successfully implemented at other campuses. We include them all for completeness.

We have organized the strategies and ideas into six main categories:

Information

  1. Publicize what is allowed under Prop 209, i.e. change the focus from what we can't do to what we can do.
  2. Make official statements
  3. Inform Departments
  4. Sponsor research on topics of diversity, such as:
  5. Publicize information
  6. Address need for more information on how to change institutional cultures.

Pools and recruiting

  1. Allocate resources to do pro-active outreach.
  2. Provide tools, best practices, training on best practices in recruitment for faculty.
  3. Establish a UC Equity Institute to assist in this training and research.
  4. Identify crucial points in the pipeline where women and minorities drop out, and establish programs to counteract this problems. (These programs may not benefit Berkeley directly, but they will benefit the larger academic community and be models for others).
  5. Recruit from the UC graduate student and postDoc pool.
  6. Change the balance of new hires to hire more at the junior level
  7. Break the hiring process into discrete steps, monitor each step in a timely manner, and interrupt the process if unsatsifactory.
  8. Interview includes access to "communities" of women and minority facult in te field.
  9. Consider spousal hiring

Diversity vs. Excellence

  1. Find and promote models for excellence that are nontraditional
  2. Quality of faculty and adminsitrators:
  3. Establish an invited lecture or colloquium series on reaearch in diveristy and best practices, e.g. "Faculty who make a difference" luncheon.
  4. Set Targets

Individual's actions

  1. Volunteer to sit on search committees rather than wait to be asked. This is where hiring decisions are made.
  2. Build community within the university and between faculty and graduate students
  3. Make conversations on diersity part of the department climate

Infrastructure

  1. Closer coordination between FEA and SWEM (Ex-officio?)
  2. Revitalize and support the CCSW -- invite broad participation from students, staff, and faculty.
  3. Staff support for FEA and SWEM activities.
  4. Maintain a strong women's center.
  5. Develop a curriculum that values diversity, and hire faculty to teach it.
  6. Aid in community building
  7. Support implementation of strategies via the Gender and Equity Resource Center.

Retention

  1. Address the quality of life issues, such as salary, child care, housing, etc.
  2. Make procedures more transparant
  3. Reestablish junior faculty mentor programs.
  4. Conduct training programs for communication and management skills.
  5. FEA bring together groups to talk about shared concerns, and promote other means for fostering discussion.
  6. Interactive theater and other ways to address institutional culture, raise awareness, and to encourage preferred behavior.
  7. Develop and promote professional development strategies for faculty women -- how men and women at the institution can promote the success of newly arrived faculty.