Archive

February 10, 2005

Minority faculty present ideas for increasing their numbers at UW

Editor’s Note: This is one of a series of articles written by the chairs of the Faculty Senate’s councils and committees. Brian Fabien is the chair of the Special Committee on Minority Faculty Affairs.

The Special Committee on Minority Faculty Affairs (SCMFA) is a standing committee that reports to the Senate Executive Committee through the Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs. The SCMFA has a mandate to serve as advocates for minority faculty at the University of Washington.

Over the last few years the constituents of the SCMFA have become frustrated with the lack of progress being made by the university in terms of the hiring and retention of minority faculty. Recently, a letter addressing these issues was presented to President Emmert. Please note that the letter is endorsed by over 100 faculty members.

Due to space limitations the entire letter cannot appear here; however, it can be found at http://www.washington.edu/faculty/facsenate/councils/scmfa/scmfa.html. Below we provide excerpts of the letter.

As a whole, faculty of color remain grossly under-represented on campus. Black women and men are a mere 1 percent each of the ladder faculty as a whole; Latinas and Latinos, another 1 percent each; American Indian women and men add up to 0 percent (though there are 6 women and 4 men at the entire University); and “Asian” faculty are only 3 percent (women) and 6 percent (men) of the UW professoriate. White men remain 70 percent of the full professors, 60 percent of the faculty as a whole, and even 41.5 percent of the assistant professors — despite much hype about the impossibility of white men finding faculty appointments. (We might note that in contrast to their numbers among the ladder faculty, white men are a distinct minority among full-time lecturers, 36 percent, and senior lecturers, 36 percent.)

We would like to share some of our ideas for ways to increase the numbers of non-white faculty at the UW, to improve the climate for those who are here, and to decrease the demoralizing attrition rates for faculty of color. Our suggestions reach beyond only faculty of color, however, and would improve the working conditions for the entire faculty.

• Use cluster hiring. When we lose a number of faculty of color in one year, it takes many years to replace them, thus shrinking our numbers in the interim. We urge the administration to build on the past practice of using Target of Opportunity hires to build the faculty of color, and to expand on this practice by hiring faculty in clusters, especially in clusters of fields of interest. Feelings of isolation, cultural alienation, and social dislocation can be heavy burdens for faculty who are the only person of their race or ethnicity (or one of two or three) in their field or in any related field. Cluster hires would enable the UW to replace faculty of color more quickly when they leave, and to build cohorts, and thereby community, that will make it more appealing for these new hires to stay at the University. In the past, cluster hiring has been a highly effective method of increasing faculty of color and an essential element of retaining many of them.
  
• Challenge I-200. In 2004 the US Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled that affirmative action programs are legal and valuable in ensuring racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in higher education. Yet the State of Washington and the University of Washington have done nothing to dismantle I-200, allowing I-200 to continue to stand as a glaring symbol of a negative racial climate.

Since its passage, the number of minority undergraduate and professional student enrollments have declined across Washington state. The Seattle Times has called on the state legislature to rescind this “mean-spirited” and no longer legally justifiable law. We join the Seattle Times and call upon the University of Washington to publicly declare its commitments to the advancement of the goals of true diversity, equal opportunity, and access in higher education.

Moreover, we call upon the University to use this moment, when the nation’s courts stand in support of the goal of diversity, to adopt a broader, more visionary and more creative set of diversity goals. Merely hiring in proportion to the extant pool of candidates will never lead to real diversity in the academy. The University should become a national leader by setting its sights higher — to create a faculty that truly represents the state of Washington’s population.

• Create Faculty Advocates for all junior faculty. Some departments provide Faculty Advocates for all of their faculty, and we encourage the University to broaden this approach to assistant professor support. Faculty Advocates are members of the faculty, but not members of their colleague’s department. They provide mentorship, and they represent their colleague during her/his annual review. Such mentorship would be one way of providing junior faculty with more support and more training in the profession they have entered. We urge that Faculty Advocates be created for all junior faculty, not only faculty of color.
  
• Reinstate the Presidential Faculty Development Fellowships. These fellowships provided exceptional junior faculty with the opportunity to concentrate on enhancing their research/teaching portfolios in the time period leading up to the tenure review. A number of our currently tenured faculty members have benefited greatly from this program.