An effort to diversify UCLA’s faculty entered its third
year this week, with supporters saying that talking to university
administrators is like communicating with a stone wall.
Among other recommendations, an initiative presented to
Chancellor Albert Carnesale in February 2003 calls for the opening
of six new faculty positions for each of the campus’s four
ethnic studies centers.
The proposal came amid concern that the UC’s plan to
expand its faculty body would ignore the dismal percentage of
minority instructors within the system.
The percentage of tenured and tenure-track UC minority
professors rose from 19.6 in 1996 to 20.5 in 2002, according to a
California Research Bureau report released last year.
But despite the stagnation, UCLA’s administration seems to
have put the issue on the backburner, the initiative’s
supporters said.
“We have not had any kind of indication … about what the
chancellor, the administration, really thinks about this
proposal,” said Hanay Geiogamah, interim director of the UCLA
American Indian Studies Center, which sponsored the initiative with
UCLA’s other three ethnic studies centers.
“We haven’t gotten anything other than a polite sort
of stonewall. … We seem to be, I think, knocking on a stone
door.”
Though the administration has not passed the proposal, it
actively promotes diversity, wrote UCLA spokeswoman Letisia Marquez
in an e-mail quoting UCLA spokesman Lawrence Lokman. According to
the e-mail, Lokman pointed to the establishment of the Asian
American studies and Chicana/o studies departments as evidence of
Carnesale’s commitment to the cause.
“Our campus is committed to seeking a diverse campus
community that reflects the society in which we live. … In spite
of substantial budget cuts, the chancellor recently committed
additional new resources, including new full-time positions,”
Lokman said.
According to the Web site for the Office of Faculty Diversity, a
new agency under Carnesale, 80 percent of tenured UCLA faculty are
white. But statistics there also show that the percentage of the
tenure-track faculty who are Asian climbed from below 10 percent in
1990 to between 10 and 15 percent in 2002.
Still, the administration’s response to the proposed
initiative mirrors the unwillingness in academia today to look at
racial issues with a critical eye, said Darnell Hunt, director of
the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. While the
atmosphere three decades ago was one of concern about racial
equality, many people act as if all obstacles have been overcome,
he said.
Several students and professors called for protests to move the
initiative forward after two years of unfruitful work that included
getting letters of support from faculty and community leaders.
Hunt said while he prefers using “carrot-and-stick”
tactics to bargain, it is healthy for a movement to mix negotiation
with direct action.
Alex Tucker, the Bunche Center’s special project and
development coordinator, said he plans to unite members of the
campus and wider community in a committee to push the proposal
forward.
“This is the third year. … I hope we don’t do this
the fourth or the fifth year,” Tucker said, referring to a
Thursday townhall meeting initiative that supporters hosted in part
as an annual update on progress.
The state’s political climate in recent years has added to
disinterest, eroding any momentum the initiative had, said Chon
Noriega, Chicano Studies Research Center director. With the recall
and budget crisis consuming Sacramento, diversity at the UC has not
been a priority, he said.
Graduate students are California’s future professors, and
attending an institution whose faculty do not represent the
community can be discouraging, Noriega said.
“They’re essentially facing a highly exclusionary
institution that is not prepared to retain them,” he
said.
While UCLA administrators have strong arguments for not
prioritizing faculty diversity, the university cannot wait any
longer, Noriega added.
“Times are tough. … But if something is important, you
make it a reality,” he said.
“If we don’t do something, we’re going to wake
up back in the 1950s.”