What’s in motion?

05 February 2003 |

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.

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
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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:

• Family-leave survey: Preliminary analysis of a survey on UC’s family-leave policies indicates striking differences in the experiences of men and women with regard to family formation and the use of these policies. The results of the survey will be released soon. (Collaborators: Dean Mary Ann Mason, Marc Goulden, and Christopher Davidson)

• Career-trajectory analyses:An analysis of salary and career trajectories of faculty is in progress. The results will be released by the end of the semester. (Collaborator: Professor Trond Pedersen)

• Academic-climate survey: A survey on the campus academic climate will be circulated shortly. While many faculty members find Berkeley to be a “good” place to work, the campus is interested in how to make it an “excellent” place to work. The faculty survey focuses on four areas: employment experiences, expectations and degree of satisfaction, perceptions of the work environment with respect to colleagues and administrators, and basic demographic information. (Collaborators: Academic Senate Committee on Women and Ethnic Minorities)