What's in Motion
At Berkeley, and throughout the UC system, there’s an emerging activism to support progress toward greater faculty diversity — taking the form of official and ad hoc committees; research on hiring, retention, and promotion; and new initiatives. Here are some developments and resources of note.
6 February 2003
Office of Faculty Equity Assistance
The campus Office of Faculty Equity Assistance, headed by Angelica Stacy, develops and oversees policies and programs dealing with faculty recruitment, development, and retention. For information on these campus efforts, see the office’s website at fea.chance.berkeley.edu or contact Stacy at 642-1935 or fea@socrates.berkeley.edu.edu.
New faculty-equity initiatives
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The campus has made a commitment to hire faculty, as much as possible, at the
junior level, where the pools for non-tenured positions are more diverse.
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Executive
Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Gray and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
and Faculty Affairs Jan de Vries have required all academic
units to
analyze the diversity of their faculty compared to the pool of available scholars.
The campus then takes these numbers into account when allocating new tenure-track
faculty positions.
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The Office of Faculty Equity Assistance
is monitoring the hiring process — the
wording in job advertisements, the diversity in the applicant pool, and
reasons for deselecting candidates. A new web-based system
allows for timely monitoring,
to help determine whether there is sufficient diversity in an applicant
pool and whether a search should be extended.
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The Office of the Vice Provost for
Academic Affairs and Faculty Welfare has partnered with
other Bay Area institutions to help launch a website to
identify
jobs for the partners of faculty candidates. The vice provost is also working
on a housing-loan program. The lack of jobs for partners and the cost of housing
are key reasons that faculty candidates turn down job offers.
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Under a new program
of UC President Richard Atkinson, a campus unit is
awarded a "free" position if it hires a faculty candidate from the UC President’s
postdoctoral pool. This is a diverse pool of highly talented
faculty candidates. A list
of current postdoctoral fellows may be obtained from the Office of the
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Faculty Welfare.
Current research studies
The associate vice provost for faculty equity is conducting
a number of studies, in collaboration with campus researchers,
to shed light on diversity-related
issues.They include:
(Collaborators: Academic Senate Committee on Women and
Ethnic Minorities)
