July 22, 2004
Opinion: UW minority hiring guidelines too low
The July 8 issue of University Week had a front page story titled “Minority Hiring Lags.” Within the story were these lines, “Though minority faculty are growing in overall numbers, the UW is falling short of its own stated goals for employing black and Hispanic faculty members.” And later in the story, these lines appear: “But the news is not all bad—the report shows the UW’s fairly modest goals have been met in hiring Asian, Native American, and female faculty.”
Although the article deals well with many issues related to the hiring and retention of minority faculty, there are some elements of the story that call for amplification. As the director of the American Indian Studies Program, as a member of the UW’s Diversity Council, and as the former chair of the Special Committee on Minority Faculty Affairs, I wish to provide that amplification, especially in relationship to the idea that any reasonable goals for the hiring of American Indian faculty have been met.
The article references the latest Utilization and Goals report as a means of evaluating the University’s success in minority hiring. (The entire report is available at the University’s Equal Opportunity Office Web site: http://www.washington.edu/admin/eoo/ .) My issue with the report is this: The report uses government guidelines that set minimal standards for federal compliance with EEOC laws.
In evaluating minority hiring success, numbers are compared to the “available pool” of potential professors. In most cases the pool consists of the available Ph.D.s who have gained degrees within a particular discipline. For evaluating total ladder faculty, the availability percentage — the “target” for American Indian faculty — is 0.3% of the total. Thus for 3,000 ladder faculty at the UW the “goal” for American Indian professors is 0.3% of 3000, or 10 professors. We have 10 ladder faculty at the UW so the “goal” is met.
In this case, the “University goal” is absurdly low.
My hope for the University runs in a different direction, however. I would hope that the University would set its own standards for the hiring of minority faculty, and these standards would be ambitious and aggressive. Simply put, we need higher standards because we expect the best of ourselves as an institution. We must not let our standards be set by federal regulations that many people argue perpetuate an exclusionary “status quo.” In order to be a national leader in the area of diversity we need standards that place us on the leading edge.
The University of Washington’s EEOC Office is obligated to use the federal guidelines for compiling federal reports; the University of Washington, at large, can, and should, use other measures for evaluating its efforts for the hiring and retention of minority faculty. Only by using more demanding guidelines will we ever reach the “critical mass” that will allow for diversity to bloom.
Tom Colonnese is the director of the UW’s American Indian Studies Program.
