A University of California report released Tuesday showed that
minority representation in faculty does not mirror the
state’s population, an issue UC officials say is connected
with the problem of declining admissions of underrepresented
minorities.
Of the 65 UCLA faculty appointed in the 2004-2005 academic year,
45 were white, 12 Asian and three black, in addition to one
Chicano/Latino faculty member and one American Indian, according to
the UC President’s Task Force on Faculty Diversity.
Currently, underrepresented minorities make up about 8.7 percent
of UCLA faculty, and when including Asians minorities they account
for 19 percent.
The task force included methods for the UC to improve diversity,
such as outreach programs and ensuring the environment at its
campuses is welcoming toward minority faculty.
But the existence of the task force, which provides a forum for
addressing diversity, is in itself important for the UC’s
move toward a more diverse faculty, said Jody Kreiman, chairwoman
of the Academic Senate Committee on Diversity and Equal
Opportunity, which advises the university administration on how to
improve diversity in the UC.
The relatively low number of underrepresented minority faculty
have concerned university officials because of the academic
atmosphere they believe it creates and the image of UCLA they said
it may project, which are some of the reasons officials have found
the recent admissions statistics troubling.
“If we come to be perceived as a “˜ghettoized’
institution, serving only some racially limited elite of either
whites or … some other not-fully-representative mix, we are not
going to be a very attractive institution for the state to
support,” said John Oakley, chairman of the UC Academic
Senate.
The difficulties facing UCLA in hiring a diverse faculty are
some of the same ones that have brought about the decrease in
underrepresented minority students, Oakley said.
He attributed the numbers of underrepresented minority faculty
members to Proposition 209, which UC and state officials have
pegged as a major cause for the decrease in underrepresented
minority students being admitted to the UC recently.
“Proposition 209 … seems to have had some sort of
immediate adverse effects,” he said.
But there are other explanations for the number of
underrepresented minority faculty. Kreiman pointed to a cyclical
trend, where low numbers of underrepresented minority students and
faculty deter others from attending.
“If you’re recruiting someone and they perceive they
would be the only person like them on campus, it makes them feel a
little more unwelcome,” she said.
There is also a connection between the diversity in the
undergraduate population and that in the faculty population, Oakley
said
He said the low number of minority students in undergraduate and
graduate schools directly affects the group of faculty who go on to
be professors.
“If you don’t train a diverse pool of undergraduates
and then encourage them to go on to graduate school and then
encourage them to be a faculty member … you’re never going
to solve the problem,” Oakley said.
The UC has set out various ways to approach the problem, such as
more outreach programs to attract a more diverse pool of applicants
and improving retention of faculty by creating a more inclusive
environment at UCLA, said Associate Vice Chancellor of Faculty
Diversity Rosina Becerra, who chaired the UC President’s Task
Force on Faculty Diversity.