ADVANCE Partnerships for Adaptation, Implementation and Dissemination Award: Partnership for Faculty Equity and Diversity

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

The five southern California campuses of the University of California (UC) system propose an ongoing series of workshops and seminars targeting senior academic administrators. The Partnership campuses are: Irvine (UCI), Los Angeles (UCLA), Riverside (UCR), San Diego (UCSD), and Santa Barbara (UCSB). The proposed workshops and seminars allow dissemination of lessons learned and best practices that have enabled UCI to dramatically increase hiring of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields during the ADVANCE award (September 2001-present). While excellent progress has been made in recruiting women to UCI, the Partnership will focus on strategies to retain and advance women and minority faculty. The workshops promote understanding, facilitate training, and encourage implementation of the novel programs developed at the Irvine campus and by other ADVANCE initiatives. Experts on institutional transformation and faculty diversity agree that the top administration must provide accountability for diversity for deans and department chairs to implement effective strategies for recruiting, retaining, and advancing a diverse professoriate. In order for changes to "filter down" to the departmental level, higher administrators need to develop strategies for holding deans accountable for their units so that the deans will then develop strategies for holding departments accountable. Chairs are the key link between upper level administrators and the faculty. Department chairs' key role in implementing new policies, like the UC family friendly policies, coupled with the challenge of constantly shifting chairs who may not have gained the interpersonal relations and bureaucratic skills essential for equitable implementation, implies a pressing need for chairs' training. Department chairs, as "climate regulators", serve an essential function in ensuring that faculty members who make use of such policies do not experience retaliation by their departmental colleagues. The University of California is the largest public university in the United States with over 200,000 students on ten campuses employing more than 8,000 ladder-rank faculty members. The system's student population is quite diverse, yet the faculty population remains predominantly white and male. In recent years, many campuses have increased the rate of hiring women and minority faculty members, yet retention of these promising scholars through the rigorous review process will require that administrators are capable of implementing new policies (e.g., family friendly policies) while at the same time ensuring a work environment that welcomes faculty from diverse backgrounds. The Implementation Team involves scholars and professionals who are diverse in terms of discipline, ethnicity, and gender. The diversity of this team will be key in implementing a program that appeals to administrators from broad backgrounds and weaves sensitivity to gender and ethnic issues throughout the planned programming. The expectation is that the programs for provosts, deans and chairs become a model for other institutions that care about faculty equity and diversity.