UO’s racial, ethnic, and gender diversity hiring problem.

6/7/2011: I’m not a big fan of defining diversity on those narrow grounds. But it you are, the UO faculty are not the problem, the UO administration is.  

If you look at page 29 of UO’s Affirmative Action Report, you will find that UO’s tenure track faculty is representative of the national pool of qualified minority applicants (i.e. minorities with PhD’s) for every academic category except Music (2 short). For females, Business was 2 short, and Natural Sciences 12 short. Small numbers, given that we’ve got about 750 TT faculty.

The UO Administration, on the other hand, is 3 short on minority executives, and 2 short on women. This is out of maybe 20 execs total?

For senior administrators, UO is 9 short on females. There’s no big mystery for this: many of UO’s administrators are inside promotions, hired without competitive, open, affirmative action compliant searches. President Lariviere has changed this for new hires, but the old guard are still here, sucking on the state’s sugar tit, as Huey Long would have said. Faculty, on the other hand, are hired only after public notice of a job opening, and rigorous open searches.

Most people are surprised to learn that the UO faculty *are* representative racially. When you look around campus, it is surprising there are so few minority faculty at UO. How can we possibly be representative – it seems absurd. The answer is simply that there are so few minority PhD’s in the national hiring pool.

Given this, efforts by UO to recruit minority faculty are just moving scarce minority faculty from one university to another. And probably moving them away from schools where the opportunities to mentor minority students were larger. Our gain is their loss.

So efforts on faculty recruiting – which have been the primary focus of UO’s diversity expenditures for years – may make people at UO feel like they are doing something, but they are not addressing the fundamental issue, for UO and for our country at large: too few minority PhD’s.

This is why we need a “fill-the-pipeline” approach, and why it is important to start young: to put people in the pipeline who would not otherwise get there. Will our new VP for Diversity take this approach?