UC begins review of faculty diversity

A task force to review

faculty diversity at the University of California began visiting
campuses last week, the first step in UC President Robert
Dynes’ plan to assess and improve minority
representation in the university’s faculty.

Dynes believes that to stay competitive, the UC must ensure
minorities and women are proportionally represented among
tenure-track professors.

Members of the President’s Task Force on
Faculty Diversity plan to visit every UC campus over the next two
months, collecting information about
departments’ hiring practices and asking for
faculty members’ opinions and suggestions.

“They’re going to review
efforts to hire and retain diverse faculty,†said Lori
Alvarez, an assistant to Rosina Becerra, UCLA’s
associate vice chancellor of faculty diversity.

The 11-member task force is headed by Becerra and comprises
professors from throughout the UC system, most of whom also serve
on their own universities’ diversity
committees.

The task force was assembled in response to a 2004 report from
the California Research Bureau, which said female and minority
professors are underrepresented at the University of California,
Alvarez said.

The task force aims, in part, to introduce communication between
different levels of university administration, said Yolanda Moses,
a member of the task force and professor of anthropology at UC
Riverside.

“We make faculty hires at the department
level,†Moses said.
“That’s very critical because
most departments don’t talk to each other about
what they’re doing.â€

By finding individual departments at UC campuses that are
successfully hiring minority faculty, Moses said, the task force
can suggest that the same practices be implemented systemwide.

Proposition 209, which was passed in 1997, prohibits the state
from granting “preferential treatment to any
individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or
national origin in the operation of … public
education.â€

The proposition has posed a problem for institutions, such as
the UC, who have attempted to increase the diversity of their
employees in recent years.

Moses explained that the task force’s
activities in no way violate Proposition 209, as it will never
advocate hiring candidates based on those criteria.

Instead, she said, the task force aims to broaden the applicant
pool to reflect pool of people qualified for the positions.

“There are no quotas. …
We’re just casting a wide net,†she
said. “You do it on the front end of the process,
not the back end.â€

A lack of faculty diversity hurts the university and its
students, since it limits the breadth of topics available for
study, said Gibor Basri, a member of the task force and an
astronomy professor at UC Berkeley.

“The student body is much more diverse than
the faculty right now,†Basri said.
“A lot of students are looking for research
topics that are not there, for role models that are not there. …
The education mission of the university is not being carried out
fully.â€

Systemwide faculty diversity does not mean striving to meet any
numerical ideals, or even that different departments should be
diverse in the same ways, Basri said.

“It does vary according to field,â€
Basri said, adding that criteria for diversity include age and
specialization as well as ethnicity and gender.

According to a report from the UC Office of the President, only
27 percent of tenured UC faculty appointed between the 2000-2001
and 2003-2004 academic years were women, despite the fact that the
availability pool consisted of 44 percent women.

Minorities were better represented than women in the
university’s faculty — during
those years, the availability pool included 7 percent
underrepresented minorities, and 7 percent of the tenured faculty
hired were underrepresented minorities.

Four members of the task force will visit UCLA Oct. 10 and 11 to
evaluate faculty diversity, as well as examine departmental hiring
practices and applicant outreach.

After campus visits conclude on Nov. 22, the task force will
produce a report. The UC Office of the President will then convene
a systemwide administrative and faculty meeting to address issues
brought up by the report.

“This is going to be a long-term
process,†Moses said.

A preliminary report is scheduled to be delivered to the UC
chancellors by January 2006.