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Volume 37, Number 14

Thursday, December 15, 2005


FSEC discusses "disappointing" figures on faculty diversity

By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor

UB can improve its recruitment and retention of minority faculty members only with the help of current faculty, President John B. Simpson told the Faculty Senate Executive Committee yesterday.

During a presentation on diversity by the Faculty Senate Affirmative Action Committee, the president called "disappointing" the group's findings on the percentage of minority faculty members at UB.

As of October 2004, of the 1,514 total faculty members at the university, 52 were black, 37 Hispanic, 220 Asian and 11 Native American. A total of 450 faculty members, or about 30 percent, were female.

"There's a lot of responsibility in this situation that we have here. It rests in part with the administration," Simpson said. "At the same time, at the end of the day, it is not the president who hires the faculty; it is the faculty who hires the faculty. It is really something that we all have to do if this is an institution of value."

Sharon E. Nolan-Weiss, assistant director in the Office of Equity, Diversity and Affirmative Action, emphasized that retaining the minority professors that have been hired is a critical aspect of the issue. She said she was encouraged by the fact that the numbers of females at the assistant and associate professor levels was on the rise, "which underscores the importance of retention."

Simpson asked how many present have some kind of "formalized program" for mentoring and/or retaining junior faculty members. When only a few professors raised their hands, the president remarked that "I would guess there's nothing systematic at the university for this."

But Cemal Basaran, professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering, noted that written policies and guidebooks can't replace one-on-one mentoring by senior faculty members. The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has "one of the better mentoring programs" at UB in which junior faculty members choose mentors who "essentially walk them through the process until they get tenure or become a full professor."

"There are many things written about how to get tenure, but there are many things unwritten or that cannot be written down," Basaran said. "I benefited significantly from my mentor; everything he told me, later on I found it was true, but it was not written anywhere. You cannot write it down."

Lilliam Malave, associate professor of learning and instruction in the Graduate School of Education, agreed, saying that while her school has "lost most of the minorities" who were faculty members, "We have kept every junior faculty member who has been paired with a successful senior faculty member."

Mentoring is a key focus of the recruitment-and-retention guide that the affirmative action committee is creating for the university, according to Mattie L. Rhodes, clinical associate professor, School of Nursing, and chair of the committee. Among its suggestions for how departments can attract and retain minority faculty members is one that encourages the enlisting of several mentors each for junior faculty members to assist them with educational, professional and social aspects of their new lives.

Toward that end, the UB Minority Faculty and Staff Association (MFSA) makes itself available to UB job candidates to answer their questions about the university and Western New York in general. The MFSA now offers a welcome packet to new hires to help them locate shopping centers, recreation and places of worship in their neighborhoods.

Several FSEC members noted that UB is not alone in its quest for more minority faculty members, and said part of the problem may be that there are fewer minority candidates for any given job.

Merrill T. Dayton, chair of the Department of Surgery, School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, asked if the committee knows how many minorities apply or interview for faculty positions at UB.

Barbara A. Burke, associate director in the Office of Equity, Diversity and Affirmative Action, replied that "it's a diminishing set of numbers. The question is, why is it small to start with?"

Rhodes said the affirmative action committee encourages departments to look at their own "strong, talented" graduate students as potential hires in the future.

"We're suggesting that they might be a viable source of minority faculty," she said.

Basaran countered that like the number of minority faculty members, the number of minority engineering graduate students has decreased.

"How can we hire minority and female faculty when there is no supply, when there is nobody in the pipeline? Our objective should be increasing the number of minority and female graduate students first rather than trying to attract something that doesn't even exist," he said.

Glendora Johnson-Cooper, social sciences librarian, Undergraduate Library, and member of the committee, said that the committee will work to "better define this pipeline issue and identify the areas where it really is an issue."

Samuel D. Schack, Martin Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, said he feared a general "misapprehension about the faculty" at UB; "that is, except for minority faculty and women faculty, everybody else doesn't support trying to achieve diversity."

But Johnson-Cooper said that the committee simply wants faculty members to consider new ideas for increasing diversity at UB.

"We're saying that perhaps what we need to do is examine the tactics that we're using and perhaps change them," she said. "What we're doing is not manifesting itself in the numbers that we see, so whatever we're doing may not be working as well as we need it to work. So how can we look at this whole situation differently and begin to use some strategies that will hopefully begin to change the numbers."

Johnson-Cooper cautioned that this does not mean hiring minority candidates simply because they are minorities.

"No one is suggesting that quality be abandoned; we want the best for the institution and quality never leaves the mix," she said.

In other business, the FSEC approved a proposal from the senate's grading committee to extend the period in which students may resign courses without penalty to the 11th week of either a fall or spring semester, and through the first two-thirds of other academic terms. The extension allows students time to determine their mid-term grades status and thus, whether or not they should drop courses in which they aren't performing well, according to William H. Baumer, professor of philosophy and chair of the grading committee. The proposal now goes to the full Faculty Senate for a first reading at its February meeting.

The FSEC also voted its support for a set of seven standard academic calendars for UB, which will be forwarded to Simpson for adoption. The set of calendars, each with an alternate spring semester leap-year schedule, constitute what is a "perpetual calendar" for the university, the adoption of which would "set definitive schedules and forestall future lengthy discussions" about scheduling, Baumer said.