In The Art of Diversity: A Chronicle of Advancing the University of California Faculty through Efforts in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, 2010–2022, Susan Carlson details the University of California’s systemwide efforts to increase the diversity of its faculty during her tenure as Vice Provost, UC Office of the President. It tells the story of a remarkable alignment of California stakeholders—from the UC Regents and University leaders to the Academic Senate and the California legislature, from small faculty teams to multicampus coalitions—and how they worked to create a 21st-century faculty that reflects the diversity of California. This chronicle’s central focus is on a community of practice dedicated to excellence and equity. Efforts began with a program focused on finding new ways to collect data on faculty recruitment and create multicampus discussions on key topics like mentoring, intersectional racial and gender identities, workplace climate, and statements on diversity, equity, and inclusion. These efforts continued with a novel interactive theater program for department chairs and deans. The capstone effort, Advancing Faculty Diversity, provides opportunities to pilot new ways to recruit and sustain inclusive and equitable academic communities.
Carlson addresses this central academic issue: how to build a faculty that is different from the past not only in its gender and racial makeup, but also in its research methodologies, transdisciplinary partnerships, and multimodal pedagogies.
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on university faculty, unduly those from underrepresented groups, causing many faculty to disengage. Writing communities represent a promising tool to (re-)engage faculty and build an inclusive climate. As part of U See I Write, a faculty development initiative at the University of California, Irvine, we convened a series of monthly writing retreats between March and June of 2021, with between-retreat weekly writing sessions in smaller groups and an expectation to write daily for at least 30 minutes. In a diverse cohort of 34 faculty writers, program participation resulted in a significant increase in writing and work engagement. Similar initiatives at other institutions of higher education may prove successful in faculty (re-)engagement while also advancing faculty diversity.
A classifier may be limited by its conditional misclassification rates more than its overall misclassification rate. In the case that one or more of the conditional misclassification rates are high, a neutral zone may be introduced to decrease and possibly balance the misclassification rates. In this paper, a neutral zone is incorporated into a three-class classifier with its region determined by controlling conditional misclassification rates. The neutral zone classifier is illustrated with a text mining application that classifies written comments associated withstudent evaluations of teaching.
Feelings and questions of belonging are central to daily life. Highlighting this centrality, research and theory in higher education have offered robust definitions and frameworks for understanding what it means to belong, how it shapes meaningful life outcomes, and how to foster it. This chapter offers an interdisciplinary structure for putting these perspectives in conversation. To do this, I first briefly review and weave discussion about some common definitions and frameworks on belonging. Then, drawing from a place-belongingness and a politics of belonging framework—which describes how belonging is both an intimate feeling and bounded by intersecting social forces that serve to include and exclude various social realities—I highlight key factors (autobiographical, relational, cultural, economic, legal, elective) that constitute belonging. I offer concrete examples for attending to each factor as a pathway for building relational spaces that critically foster belonging for college students.
From its earliest beginnings, the university was not designed for women, and certainly not for women of color. Women of color in the United States are disproportionately underrepresented in academia and are conspicuous by their absence across disciplines at senior ranks, particularly at research-intensive universities. This absence has an epistemic impact and affects future generations of scholars who do not see themselves represented in the academy. What are the barriers to attracting, advancing, and retaining women faculty of color in academia? To address this question we review empirical studies that document disparities in the assessment of research, teaching, and service in academia that have distinct implications for the hiring, promotion, and professional visibility of women of color. We argue that meaningful change in the representation, equity, and prestige of women faculty of color will require validating their experiences, supporting and valuing their research, creating opportunities for their professional recognition and advancement, and implementing corrective action for unjust assessment practices.
Faculty of color (FOC) lead much of the diversity, equity, and inclusion work that supports racially- and economically-minoritized students and improves the campus climate. In this way, FOC help institutions develop a stronger organizational identity around servingness - a shift from enrolling to serving the needs of minoritized students holistically (Garcia, 2017). Such work is critical. As campuses serve increasingly diverse student populations, like Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), the underlying structures of these institutions remain rooted in Whiteness. Research examining the experiences of FOC in leadership in HSI settings is limited (Ledesma & Burciago, 2015). The current research examines how FOC experience Whiteness in structures of leadership in an HSI context, and how their own leadership efforts reform such structures. Guided by perspectives in Critical Race Theory and Critical White Studies, the research team analyzed semi-structured interviews with 16 FOC using both inductive and deductive methods. Results revealed how Whiteness was reflected in the structural diversity of leadership; in the devaluation of leadership efforts of FOC; and in undemocratic approaches to decision-making. FOC reformed such structures by focusing their leadership efforts on the needs, voices, and lived experiences of people of color at the university; pushing forward collective, grassroots activities; and centering their approaches in collaboration. The collective voices of FOC call for an urgent need for transformational changes to structures of leadership in an HSI context toward the goal of building a more racially-just, equitable institution.
