Academy, AAUP Confronted on Low Faculty Diversity
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Faculty members concerned about diversity took the academy as well as the American Association of University Professors to task for not doing enough to promote diversity at one session of AAUP’s 93rd annual meeting, “Telling the Truth at Difficult Times,” which started June 7 and concluded Sunday.
http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_7421.shtml
June 13th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
I have been committed to “changing the face of the faculty” for many years through the various administrative positions that I have held and, in fact, lecture on the subject regularly. One of my slides shows the faculty demographics and I comment that there is no date on the slide because the numbers have really not changed in all the time that I have been doing this! Unfortunately, the current article just reemphasizes this! Granted, it is great that the issue is raised at conferences such as the AAUP Meeting, but at the same time, why were there only 30 faculty and staff attending that particular session? This speaks directly to the problem. This problem is truly one facing the entire “Academy” and can only be effectively addressed by efforts throughout the entire Academy, i.e. Presidents, Provosts, VPs and faculty. To do this, there must be “accountability” relative to faculty diversification. If there is not , then there will always only be 30 faculty at the AAUP meeting, 20 faculty at some other conference, etc. and those types of numbers will never be able to “change the face of the faculty” in the Academy, especially without accountability. What will it take for the Academy to recognize this and “do the right thing”? Whatever that is, we have not yet identified it!
June 13th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
This article appears to suffer from selective representation of the facts. It neither acknowledges the improvements in diversity that have been achieved over the last forty years nor considers the entire picture, especially the supply problem. How many well qualified minorities that are not finding positions? How many well qualified candidates are being relegated to the growing ranks of professional adjuncts because of pressures to not hire a white male? How many candidates are discouraged from pursuing a particular research direction regardless of race (almost all, I suspect). I’m all for closing the minority gap in faculty hiring, but the first step has to be to grow the pool of well qualified candidates. We’ve achieved that, in most academic disciplines, for women. The problem we face is growing that success to more a wider range of minorities and disciplines.