Faculty diversity still lacking
BY CYNTHIA LEE
Today Staff Writer
With 91 Chicano/Latinos, 48 African Americans and six Native Americans on its faculty, UCLA has the largest number of underrepresented minority faculty of the nine academic UC campuses, according to a recent report by the UC President’s Task Force on Faculty Diversity.
But they make up only 8.7% of the faculty on campus. That is the third highest percentage systemwide, equal to the proportion at UC Santa Barbara. The campus with the highest proportion of underrepresented minority faculty is the newest, UC Merced, with 20.5%. The lowest is UC Berkeley with 6.7%.
The task force, which was chaired by UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor Rosina Becerra, found that while the number of underrepresented minority faculty is rising systemwide, “the diversity of the UC faculty has remained flat. The actual numbers of underrepresented minority faculty on each campus are so low that those faculty report experiences of isolation and marginalization in their academic life.”
Hiring of underrepresented minority faculty at UC began to rise in the early ’90s, but dropped after 1995 when the regents passed SP-1 and SP-2 and Proposition 209 took effect. Since 2000, hiring has bounced back nearly to pre-1995 levels, particularly for non-tenured faculty.
But in fields where minorities are underrepresented, such as the physical sciences and engineering, “UC hiring fails to meet even the low levels of availability,” the task force found. Nearly a quarter of underrepresented minority faculty at UC are concentrated in education, languages and ethnic studies.
After attending a systemwide summit in Oakland last month, a group of UCLA representatives are discussing what can be done locally to meet five recommendations, including incorporating diversity into every level of academic planning. The group includes Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science Patricia O’Brien; Academic Senate Chair Adrienne Lavine; Vice Chancellor for Academic Personnel Donna Vredevoe; Victoria Sork, professor and chair, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Dean of Physical Sciences Tony Chan; and Susan Drange Lee, director of the Office for Faculty Diversity.
“This is just the beginning of our discussions,” said Becerra, who is the only faculty appointee systemwide who devotes 100% time to faculty diversity. Among the possibilities being discussed is a campus diversity initiative for students, staff and faculty that will bring all of UCLA’s diversity efforts together.
Becerra said she hopes to hold regular briefings for all department chairs to address academic personnel issues facing them as well as training workshops open to all faculty who want to become mentors.
“We want to embed diversity into the UCLA culture,” said Becerra, not create separate stand-alone programs. “We want to begin to make diversity in all of its forms a part of everything we do so that it’s not seen as an afterthought.”
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