UCLA must aggresively recruit more diverse faculty

Prospective UCLA students can read in large blue letters on the institution’s website: “We’re decidedly different.”

When UCLA brands its name to these prospective students as a progressive environment, it may be true of UCLA’s student population, but not the faculty.

The description goes on to list names of UCLA’s most notable contributors, like “the father of the Internet” Vinton Cerf, researcher Dr. Dennis Slamon and Ralph Bunche. Not a single woman and only one person of color can be found on the world’s most applied-to university’s website.

Of UCLA’s 109 departments, a vast majority do not present a faculty that is reflective of the world’s gender and racial composition. From 2009 to 2014, UCLA has hired 271 new faculty members, 59 percent of which are male and 41 percent female. And of these faculty members, 58 percent are white.

UCLA departments need to be critical of their faculty environments in order to better retain their diverse faculty, and they need to be more aggressive in their recruiting efforts to strengthen these numbers.

Educators matter a great amount; the most reliable predictor of success of female undergraduates is the percentage of women among faculty members at their college. Those who have attended women’s colleges earn two to three times as many advanced degrees than those attending coed higher-education institutions.

Currently, Harvard University assesses a junior faculty survey every three or four years that gauges their satisfaction level and assesses professional factors that help catalyze more productive and successful careers.

The college then takes this data to to create a more equitable workplace and to further increase their recruitment and retention of women and minority faculty more specifically.

In doing this, Harvard can create a clearer picture of their faculty climate. These efforts, in conjunction with more strategic job outreach efforts, can catalyze a more representative and just faculty.

UCLA can adopt something similar to ensure that they are retaining their best faculty. However, it’s not enough just to retain who we have, but to aggressively recruit a racially diverse and gender-balanced faculty.

For example, the UCLA administration can mandate change and say: Department X, we are giving you Y years to begin to address the lack of major diversity and to see improvement in these numbers. While it would be difficult to hold these departments accountable, at the very least it can show the school’s serious commitment to change.

Departments may say that they are only hiring the most qualified in their fields, and those just happen to be white men. But we are living in 2016, not 1916, and we should refuse to believe that there aren’t any black or Latino or female candidates just as, if not even more, qualified than their white, male counterparts.

This is not a polarizing system wherein we make sure that if we have 50 percent male faculty, we should also have 50 percent female. But the world population is about half female and half male. And at UCLA, there are more female than male students on campus and UCLA should hope to have a faculty that is somewhat reflective of its student population.

Tyrone Howard, associate dean for equity and inclusion and professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is one of few African-American professors on this campus. Howard said, “It’s frustrating when you walk onto campus and you don’t see many faculty of color. It’s disappointing when you don’t see many women faculty.”

“I just cannot accept that we cannot find any qualified and diverse faculty, because they are out there. The question is how hard are we looking and how hard are we pursuing them,” Howard said.

Right now, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang’s office has begun efforts in addressing these issues by taking a look at the search committees for every department. He has begun by ensuring that this team, from the get-go, cannot be made of all white men but instead includes representatively diverse views.

Then once the committees are formed, they must go through training on implicit bias.

But this is not enough. UCLA needs to create a larger uproar over these issues. The school needs to be strategic and explicit in the fact that we cannot accept these current numbers. The push for a more diverse faculty needs to continue upward.

Only then can UCLA proudly and genuinely boast about its diverse campus to its prospective students.