Report of Minority Faculty Recruitment & Retention Subcommittee
DATE: May 22, 1997
TO: Board of Deans
FROM: Minority Faculty Recruitment & Retention Subcommittee: Bill Bradford, Allen Glenn, Nancy Hooyman, Gill Omenn
RE: Minority Faculty Recruitment and Retention
The subcommittee's approach is to focus on minority faculty. Issues related to women faculty are being addressed in a separate group. Our approach is to discuss recruitment and retention separately, although they are highly interrelated. For background information, see Appendix A, containing data and analysis from the Equal Opportunity Office.
-
RECRUITMENT
- HIRING AND RETENTION PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
- Discussion at Board of Deans Meetings: Each year, one of the Board of Deans meetings should include a thorough discussion of hiring and retention of minority faculty and administrators. The purpose of the meeting will be to share ideas and activities which are successful for individual units, discuss current issues in hiring and retention of minority faculty, and review detailed data on individual units performance and central administrations support for hiring and retention of minority faculty. At this annual meeting, the President and Provost shall be asked to report on the hiring and retention of minorities in central administration (e.g., deans, vice provosts, vice presidents). This meeting will reinforce the importance of minority faculty and administrators hiring and retention campus-wide. Such a meeting also may help deans and chairs overcome narrow departmental approaches to filling vacancies with individuals in the same specialty as the retiring or departed faculty member, especially in fields that are evolving in new directions or in which large pools of minority faculty might be found with a broader objective for recruitment.
- Performance Rewards and Recognition: The recruitment and retention of minority faculty should be included as part of the formal evaluation of individual units, with recognition given to those units with exemplary performance.
- RECRUITING MINORITY FACULTY
- Special Needs Recruitment Fund. A formal, centralized fund should continue to be available for such activities as supporting recruitment of minority faculty. The fund should be used to recruit in a flexible manner, such that there can be an array of support levels for the unit hiring the faculty candidate, and the fund should be available to assist with both salary and non-salary support. For example, the administrator of the fund can decide on full financial support and permanent funding or partial financial support and temporary funding, based upon circumstances. The flexibility should also include ability to support WOT hiring. The non-salary support should include such items as summer salary supplement for research, travel support, RA support, and other special support to make the recruiting package more competitive.
- Flexibility in Initial Appointment Titles. As used extensively in the Health Sciences, initial appointments in non-tenure track positions can offer a chance to get started on the many responsibilities -- teaching, scholarship, clinical services, and public service -- before the tenure clock begins. Postdoctoral fellowships and the ABD years (see item 3) are additional means of flexibility.
- President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. The President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program would provide postdoctoral fellowship support to minority and other faculty for up to three years of research, as well as mentoring and guidance in preparation for an academic career, hopefully at the University of Washington. The focus of effort will be to attain diversity among faculty on campus. Some units may find it effective to hire ABD candidates and support them while they finish. This program would be available to provide assistance.
- President's Distinguished Professors and Lecturers Program. The President's Distinguished Professors and Lecturers Program would bring outstanding underrepresented minorities and others to the campus to teach and lecture. Aggressive efforts should be made to recruit minorities to this program. The President's Distinguished Professors and Lecturers would be nominated by a sponsoring department for a stay of one month to one quarter. They would be generally available for seminars, colloquia, and informal consultations with students and faculty during their visit. The program gives faculty the opportunity to evaluate the visitors as possible faculty appointees.
- Information booklet on minority recruitment. There was a booklet and leaflet on minority recruiting which were distributed in 1989. This booklet should be updated, published, and distributed to all deans and administrators. Search committee chairs should review the booklet prior to initiating a search.
- Continuous information gathering program about minority ABDs and faculty at peer institutions. Information should be shared with deans and directors.
- ADMINISTRATOR IN CHARGE OF RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION OF MINORITY FACULTY
An individual in the Provost's Office should be formally charged with the recruitment and retention of minority faculty. Departments searching for faculty would be expected to notify this administrator when a search begins. The administrator will offer to meet with the search committees, send them information on affirmative action searches, check an interinstitutional exchange of names of minority students about to receive PhDs for names of possible candidates, and request to meet with any minority faculty brought to campus for interviews and/or set up meetings with appropriate minority faculty. The purpose of these meetings is to reinforce the campus commitment to diversity, to answer questions, to ask whether the candidates have been appropriately treated, and to discuss with them the basic conditions of hiring, should they receive an offer. The administrator also will assist the units in developing their best set of programs from those discussed above and negotiate terms of the use of the special funds with the dean. Through this administrator, units should be held accountable for their recruitment and retention of minority faculty. This administrator should have senior faculty rank. Appendix B discusses current administrative approaches at the central campus level, including Acting Provost Thoruds letter of July 23, 1996.
- HIRING AND RETENTION PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
- RETENTION
Recruitment and retention efforts must be coupled. That is, at the point of recruitment, it is important for the dean or chair to begin implementing ways to support retention. Retention initiatives can be conceptualized at three different levels:
- STANDARD SUPPORT FOR NEW FACULTY
- ADDITIONAL SUPPORT
- CHANGING THE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
A more difficult challenge in retaining faculty of color is to examine and change the organizational culture to be more welcoming and supportive of diversity. Recruiting individuals and making visible the importance of a diverse faculty must be coupled with an analysis of how the organizational culture is experienced by faculty of color, including how both formal and informal norms and practices may create barriers to minority facultys success and may contribute to dissatisfying experiences and, in some instances, resignations. Such analyses should also take account of how gender and age affect new faculty members experiences with the organizational environment within the University. These analyses can be conducted by annual interviews with faculty of color and exit interviews when faculty do leave.
A critical aspect of organizational change is training for all faculty about issues faced by new faculty, especially faculty of color. Such training might address norms of collegiality and mentoring, ways to evaluate scholarship in new fields, and how to assess student teaching evaluations of faculty of color. Deans and chairs have a critical leadership role to motivate all faculty to participate in efforts of institutional change. For example, deans and chairs could encourage faculty to develop guidelines regarding mutual responsibilities about how to develop an organizational environment that supports diversity and promotes cultural competence. Promotion and tenure and merit guidelines of the academic unit should be reviewed to assess the extent to which they recognize the diversity contributions of faculty, within the context of the academic units overall standards for excellence. Although cross-cultural opportunities should be encouraged, some faculty of color may need or want opportunities to link with minority colleagues across units. An administrator within the Provost's Office should be assigned responsibility to facilitate communication among faculty of color and to staff the continued occurrence of mentorship workshops, such as those recently organized by the Faculty Senate Special Committee on Minority Faculty Affairs.
A complementary challenge in changing the organizational culture is to ensure appropriate and active mentoring for all junior faculty and a sense of community among the junior faculty within and across related units, regardless of ethnic group. Similar efforts are needed with associate and full professors to sustain their career development, their contribution to the quality of the program, and their commitment to the department and the University.
All faculty of an academic unit must share in the responsibility to modify the organizational culture to be conducive to the retention of a diverse faculty. Without such organizational changes, efforts to recruit a diverse faculty are unlikely to be sustained.
All new faculty can benefit from a well planned and executed mentoring system which is institutionalized within the unit, not viewed as an extra. Similarly, quarterly meetings of new faculty with the dean or chair (beyond the required annual meeting) can provide systematic, ongoing feedback. In addition, all new faculty can benefit from workload adjustments that provide them adequate time to launch their research career; support for professional travel and equipment appropriate to their teaching and research; small grants to foster pilot research; and opportunities for participation as co-investigator in collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects and programs.
Minority faculty and others taking on heavy service loads often can benefit from additional supports. For example, demands upon some minority faculty members from communities and students of color may conflict with the academic units expectations for research and teaching. For many faculty of color for whom community loyalty is valued, responding negatively to requests from students or communities of color is simply not an option. Rather than try to discourage such community linkages and student mentoring, deans should work with their faculty to gain acceptance of these additional service demands as meeting University standards for tenure and promotion. In many instances, these service activities may also serve to enhance the Universitys ability to recruit and retain a diverse student body. Deans may recognize this service as well through workload adjustments or increased recognition for service in promotion and tenure and merit decisions. Summer support for research, editorial assistance with manuscripts and grants, and assignments of RAs can also support minority facultys scholarship and help mitigate the time pressure of community demands.
Because the national market for faculty of color is so competitive, deans and chairs need to have the flexibility to respond readily to competitive offers and preemptive strikes in order to retain faculty. The manner and speed in which the dean/chair or University responds can convey a message about how much the faculty member is valued.
Deans and central administration should support clusters of minority faculty with similar research or teaching interests. Once tenure has been obtained, adjunct or joint appointments may be appropriate to reinforce the importance of collaborative research clusters.