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:
- Collect and disseminate information
- Help create broader pools and improve recruitment practices
- Address the issue of excellence vs. diversity
- Encourage individual faculty to take action
- Strengthen the infrastructure
- Improve retention
Information
- Publicize what is allowed under Prop 209,
i.e. change the focus from what we can't do to what we can do.
- Make official statements
- The Berkeley Academic Senate, with assistance from SWEM, could
issue a statement on the value of diversity and what is allowed under
Proposition 209.
- Academic Senate support, as a symbolic gesture, Regent Baggely's potential
action to revoke SP-1 and SP-2
- Inform Departments
- Present departments and search committees with data,
including underutilization figures, recruitment rates over time,
etc.
- Hold fair-hiring workshops for search committees
- Review with departments their record, the pools, their plans.
- Inform departments (all members) of Diversity vs. Excellence findings
(see below)
- Provide department with list of women at top departments outside Berkeley.
- Sponsor research on topics of diversity, such as:
- Climate survey
- Analysis of search committee composition (Henry's study)
- Suggested topics/questions of study
- In what ways is the academic world and its models and
procedures gendered?
- Does diversity bread excellence?
- How do we quantify and measure bias?
- Publicize information
- Develop a public forum where these topics are addressed
- Create a UCB diversity website for students, staff,
and faculty. Tis website should be easaily accessible from the
campus main page.
- Make data, which is public information, more accessible.
- Search out and publicize best practices.
- Communicate support systems, resources, and information on UC
systems of hiring and promotion.
- Address need for more information on how to change institutional
cultures.
Pools and recruiting
- Allocate resources to do pro-active outreach.
- Provide tools, best practices, training on best
practices in recruitment for faculty.
- Establish a UC Equity Institute to assist in this training
and research.
- 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).
- Recruit from the UC graduate student and postDoc pool.
- Create and publicize a database of UC graduate students and post Docs
- Set up a program for funding intercampus seminars for grad student and
post Doc speakers.
- Change the balance of new hires to hire more at the junior level
- Break the hiring process into discrete steps, monitor each step in a
timely manner, and interrupt the process if unsatsifactory.
- Interview includes access to "communities" of women
and minority facult in te field.
- Consider spousal hiring
Diversity vs. Excellence
- Find and promote models for excellence that are nontraditional
- Quality of faculty and adminsitrators:
- Redefine administrative job descriptions to include commitment to build
and maintain a diverse student, staff, and faculty.
- Include in performance evaluations (administrative) demonstrated
accomplishments with respect to diversity.
- Job descriptions and performance evaluations for academic positions
should also include commitment to and demonstration of ability to build and
maintain a diverse student, staff, and faculty.
- Redefine quality of institution to include institutional effectiveness
in promoting a diverse faculty, staff and student body.
- Establish an invited lecture or colloquium series on
reaearch in diveristy and best practices,
e.g. "Faculty who make a difference" luncheon.
- Set Targets
- Set ambitious targets for 2010 to increase the number of women and
minority faculty
- Analyze future demands and future pools, use this information in setting
targets
- Communicate the goals to the UCOP
- Press UCOP to put together a system wide task force to analyze the future
demand for faculty by discipline and subdiscipline and estimate the pool of
candidates who are expected to be available
- UCOP review each campus's AAP and hold them accountable for
achieving it.
Individual's actions
- Volunteer to sit on search committees rather than wait to be asked.
This is where hiring decisions are made.
- Build community within the university and between faculty and graduate
students
- Make conversations on diersity part of the department climate
Infrastructure
- Closer coordination between FEA and SWEM (Ex-officio?)
- Revitalize and support the CCSW --
invite broad participation from students, staff, and faculty.
- Staff support for FEA and SWEM activities.
- Maintain a strong women's center.
- Develop a curriculum that values diversity, and hire
faculty to teach it.
- Aid in community building
- Support implementation of strategies
via the Gender and Equity Resource Center.
Retention
- Address the quality of life issues, such as salary,
child care, housing, etc.
- Make procedures more transparant
- Reestablish junior faculty mentor programs.
- Conduct training programs for communication and management
skills.
- FEA bring together groups to talk about shared concerns,
and promote other means for fostering discussion.
- Interactive theater and other ways to address institutional
culture, raise awareness, and to encourage preferred behavior.
- Develop and promote professional development strategies
for faculty women -- how men and women at the institution can
promote the success of newly arrived faculty.