Tag Archives: Diversity

That would be UO student diversity of thought. Emerald reporter Mateo Sundberg has the report on yesterday’s debate in a packed PLC 180 classroom between the student Republicans and Democrats.

Before clicking on the link for the story here, please humor me and enter your guess in the comments as to whether the College Democrat debaters are the 4 on the left or the right of Sundberg’s photo, just because I’m wondering if everyone is as bad at predicting this as I am:

When talking about diversity, Provost Banavar often notes how boring it would be to live in a world where everyone thinks the same. So it’s good to hear that’s not the world our students live in at UO.

But what about us faculty? Back in 2006 I matched the Lane County voter registration file to a list of UO professors. Out of about 700 faculty, 506 could be matched by name in both files. Of those 506 there were 25 registered Republicans.

Here’s the distribution of Oregon and Lane County voters, compared to UO:

By college, it looked like this:

10/17/2017:

I’m not going to live blog this – Bruce Blonigen will post the notes on the CAS diversity web page. There are a few undergrads, about 15 grad students (particularly women from the sciences) and about 5 people from the dean’s office. Andrew Marcus does a good job inviting suggestions, and he is getting many interesting ideas from the students. I stirred the pot a bit by noting that they should think big – the VPEI has millions of dollars for diversity, and it should be possible to reallocate it from her administrators to programs that would actually benefit students, e.g. scholarships for research experiences. For some reason the VPEI is not at this meeting to hear the students’ ideas, nor was she at the previous one with faculty.

Dear Faculty and Department Managers,

The CAS Dean’s Office is hosting the third and final DAP Town Hall next week for students on Oct 17th. Can you please pass on the information below to your class lists/student workers to get the word out? Please let us know if you have any questions or need further information. All students are welcome to attend, including graduate and undergraduate students.

Join a conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion in the College of Arts & Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) is hosting a series of town hall meetings this term to discuss the college’s Diversity Action Plans (DAPs). The next meeting will be an opportunity specifically for students to provide input on the DAPs. (There are separate meetings for students, staff and faculty.) Please join us on Tuesday, October 17^th, from 3:00-5:00 pm in the Knight Library Browsing Room. Snacks will be provided.

The town halls are an occasion for the CAS deans to discuss the plans with you, so we can respond to your questions and ideas and revise our plans with broad college participation. The more involvement we have in refining our plans, the stronger they will be, and we are eager to hear your ideas for setting diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities in CAS. Having visited togetherplatform.com/use-cases/diversity, it is clear more can be done to provide a more diverse setting in all areas of daily life.

The action plans that we created are and will be living documents. We will continue to provide opportunities in the future for everyone to offer improvements, and faculty, staff, and students are welcome to communicate their thoughts and suggest ideas at any time to [email protected]. We ask you to be familiar with the all-CAS Diversity Action Plan draft, which you can access on the CAS diversity page: https://cas.uoregon.edu/diversity/.

We look forward to hearing your ideas on October 17th.

Sincerely,

The CAS Dean’s Office

10/10/2017: VPEI Alex-Assensoh skips CAS Diversity Action Plan town hall meeting

CAS is having a town hall meeting from 3-5 today in the library reading room, on the latest draft of the CAS “Diversity Action Plan”. The order to do this came down from President Schill and VPEI Alex-Assensoh in the wake of the Halloween blackface incident. The initial draft of the CAS plan was done without much if any input from the faculty, given the initial timeline. This town hall is part of Dean Andrew Marcus’s effort to clean up this steaming pile of crap.

After complaints from the Senate about the narrow focus on race/ethnicity and gender, the May 2016 version of the VPEI’s “IDEAL” Plan now includes a more inclusive definition:

The term “diversity” can be defined in a number of different ways. The UO looks at it broadly and inclusively, encompassing race, ethnicity, disability, thought, culture, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and economics. The UO seeks to promote further diversity among its faculty, staff, and student body through active recruitment and intentional retention.

For something called “The IDEAL Plan” there sure are a lot of different versions floating around. VPEI Alex-Assensoh never bothered to return to the Senate with the revisions, nor was she at this meeting. Word down at the faculty club is she’s still out looking for another job, after the University of Louisiana turned her down.

The current draft CAS DAP plan is here. It still uses the narrow definition of diversity. There are pages and pages of administrative speak like this:

Marcus starts off by noting that the CAS Diversity statement says:

Tolerance, inclusion, curiosity and openness are essential to advancing human understanding-and thus essential to the intellectual and academic mission of the College of Arts and Sciences. We welcome a diversity of cultures, histories, languages; different types of knowledge; different talents, abilities, training; a range of experiences, affiliations, alliances and perspectives-all are necessary for creativity, invention, collaboration and problem solving. There is no meaningful learning without challenge and difference.

He then introduces the latest interim CoDaC, Director Vickey DeRose, appointed by Alex-Assensoh without consultation with the Senate, to help manage these DAPs. Marcus then notes that much of the plan was mandated by the President and cannot be changed.

The VPEI’s office has never conducted a “diversity climate” survey, despite its enormous budget, years of talk, and planeloads of consultants:

Meanwhile, volunteers from the Business School prepared and distributed a “campus climate” survey to undergraduates, as a first step in a rational way, without support from VPEI.

Their results, from their undergraduates, show that the diversity problem (at least at LCB) goes well beyond the narrow focus on race and gender that we see emphasized in the CAS plan:

These results are similar to those from the SERU survey, which UO participates in. No one in the VPEI’s office had ever heard of it:

Lots of discussion about faculty hiring. UO’s TTF faculty is already broadly representative of the available pool of PhD’s with respect to gender and race:

Someone brings up the natural question: Why not spend more resources on building the pipeline, by recruiting more under-represented undergraduates? And, at UO, the least well represented group is now low-income students.

UO is ranked #328 out of 377 selective public colleges for promoting income mobility. 56% of our students come from families in the top 20% of the income distribution (4.3% from the top 1%) and only 4.7% come from the bottom 20%:

Our economic diversity has been getting worse over time (except perhaps for a small recent blip):

Despite this poor performance and the bad trends, UO’s long debates about diversity have generally ignored economic diversity, and this new DAP seems to be doing the same.

The UO administration is now requiring all search committee members to take a two-hour training on implicit bias. I did an abbreviated version at a BOT meeting last year, and I’m at one of the three long versions right now, with about 60 other faculty and administrators. The presenter, Erik Girvan (Law), who gives these talks often, starts this one off by acknowledging that there is lots of empirical evidence showing that these trainings do not affect implicit bias, or actual behavior. So I guess we’re just here to check a box – or for the talk, which is an interesting mix of advocacy and science.

More (from my comment), responding to a comment saying Erik did a good job:

I agree. It’s tough to mix science and advocacy without going off the rails in one direction or another – particularly when you’re being paid to present a particular argument, and the audience has been ordered to attend and pay with their time. (I’ll guess that, including the opportunity cost of attendee time, these trainings cost UO about $75,000.) Erik did a good job despite this.

There was plenty I’d argue about – i.e. the casual use of “bias” when talking about conditional means which are by definition unbiased estimates, the general over-emphasis on the implicit association test, and starting with the shades-of-gray visual illusion, which is too obvious an attempt to manipulate people into agreeing they must be biased about race too. But it did grab people’s attention.

I thought the most powerful part was the behavioral results from the randomized resume and email response surveys, which show pervasive racist behavior in decisions that are clearly related to actual mentoring and employment situations.

My understanding is that people’s racist employment decisions are generally not correlated with their IAT results. That said I think Erik successfully used the IAT as a useful teaching tool, in part because it opens people up to thinking about their own biases, and maybe about their own behavior, in a safe, non-threatening way. I can see why administrators love it, regardless of the validity of the science.

Sanjay Srivastava (Psych) posted my “check a box” comment on his @hardsci twitter, and there are a bunch of comments, including some arguing that mandatory diversity training of this sort actually harms diversity, because of a reactivity effect. Check it out at https://twitter.com/hardsci

And, for the record, I am now officially certified by the University of Oregon Office of Equity and Inclusion as being allowed to participate in faculty hiring. Please don’t tell my chair!

Hello William,

You are now enrolled in the following session: “Understanding Implicit Bias”.

Below are the date(s)/time(s) of the session: Oct 12th, 2017, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

*** Course Description ***

How can someone’s race, sex, age, and other characteristics influence the way we see and treat them even when we are genuinely trying to be unbiased? What concrete steps can we take to help prevent this from happening? To help answer these questions, this workshop introduces the concept of implicit bias. Through a mix of short presentations, lively activities, and discussions, we will explore some harmful side effects of how our brains naturally perceive, categorize, and draw inferences about the world, including other people. We will also examine when this kind of bias is most likely to occur. And we will talk about what practical steps we can all take to try to reduce or eliminate it as well as what has been shown not to work. This workshop may be of particular interest to those serving on search committees and hiring managers.

*** Session Information ***
Description:  For more information, please contact: Rafael Lopez – [email protected]

Location:  EMU: 231 & 232, Cedar & Spruce Rooms

Instructor:  Dr. Erik Girvan

Please do not reply to this email as it is automatically generated.

Thank you for using Making Tracks: A Registration and Tracking System for the University of Oregon brought to you by Professional Development.

8/7/2017: UO is failing on economic diversity. Where’s the “Economic Diversity Action Plan”?

UO is ranked #328 out of 377  selective public colleges for promoting income mobility. 56% of our students come from families in the top 20% of the income distribution (4.3% from the top 1%) and only 4.7% come from the bottom 20%:

Our economic diversity has been getting worse over time (except perhaps for a small recent blip):

Despite this poor performance and the bad trends, UO’s long debates about diversity have generally ignored economic diversity. UO’s Institutional Research website has pages and pages of tables slicing and dicing UO’s students and faculty by every imaginable diversity metric – so long as those metrics are race and ethnicity or gender. The good news is that UO has improved markedly by all those measures over the past 10-15 years.

However, if you believe economic opportunity and diversity are important, you will have no luck finding that information on the IR website. If you go to UO’s Office of Equity and Inclusion’s “IDEAL Plan” you’ll find that the latest version now pays lip service to economic diversity, but you will not find a word about how UO compares on the relevant measures, or on the time trends. Similarly, the “Diversity Action Plans” that are now under preparation by every academic and administrative unit under the supervision of Equity and Inclusion have little if anything to say about economic diversity – it’s all race with a bit of gender.

Fortunately there is a new paper out with the data for UO and other colleges:

Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility
Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan
National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 23618, Revised Version, July 2017
Fact sheet: PDF
Non-technical summary: PDF
Paper: PDF
Slides: PDF | PPT
Data: Stata / Excel
NYT Interactive Tool to Explore Data: Web

Unfortunately that paper makes it very clear UO is failing when it comes to promoting economic diversity. The figures at the top of this post come from the NYT summary for UO:

A new study, based on millions of anonymous tax records, shows that some colleges are even more economically segregated than previously understood, while others are associated with income mobility.

Below, estimates of how University of Oregon compares with its peer schools in economic diversity and student outcomes.

The median family income of a student from University of Oregon is $126,400, and 56% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.4% of students at University of Oregon came from a poor family but became a rich adult.

When it comes to economic diversity UO is near the bottom whether you look at selective publics, the PAC-12, or other Oregon universities:

It would be nice to believe that these sad results will help drive UO’s diversity debate and spending priorities for promoting diversity.

Continue reading →

This does not seem to include spending on the UMRP, probably about $1M a year, or spending by the colleges:

Here’s a snippet of the 2015-16 Equity and Inclusion’s operations spending. From what I can tell none of it went to help students pay tuition. Outside consultants got $360K for “services and supplies” – and they’ve already topped that for 2016-17:

Mateo Sundberg’s Op-Ed is on the Daily Emerald website here:

Over one year ago, the Black Student Task Force released a list of twelve demands for the University of Oregon administration to address campus issues surrounding diversity and tolerance. One of the demands, demand number six, was a request for the University of Oregon to commit to hiring more African-American professors, specifically in areas outside of the humanities and the social sciences, to encourage diversity in our university’s faculty.

However, this demand, and many other similar demands for diversity by means of race and ethnicity in higher education, fails to reach its goal of creating a space of intellectual rigor, debate and ideological diversity.

Commentators on both the political left and right have highlighted how academic departments value diversity in the form of race and ethnicity over diversity in thought. Few people would try to argue that having an entire faculty of white, middle-aged, straight and upper-middle class professors would create a campus climate that was diverse and inclusive. Sadly, this line of thought does not ring true when applied to faculty having diverse political ideologies.

…

The University of Oregon should continue to pursue faculty candidates of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds because the life experiences and worldviews of minorities are important and valuable for intellectual debate.

However, if the universities do not diagnose and fix their ideological bias problem, they will become an echo chamber of only liberal ideas and thought, which would result in the failure of our universities duty to be a space of intellectual rigor that is full of debate. Universities do not have a monopoly on knowledge and intellect; they need to hire more faculty members of diverse ideological and political thought before universities render themselves obsolete.

Please consider commenting on the ODE site. Also see this post on Nick Kristof’s recent NYT Op-Ed on the same theme.

UO Professor Naomi Zack (Philosophy) is talking today at 12:00 at the ceremony in the Ford Alumni Center. She asked me to post this Eric Kelderman report on her thoughts about the award, in the Chronicle here:

…  Ms. Zack said she was skeptical of some of the measures underway at the university because they rely too much on decisions at the department level, where people are too inclined to hire those like themselves. To prevent that, she said, the hiring process needs to be directed more from the administration.

“It’s human nature to hire people who are the students of your friends,” Ms. Zack said in an interview. That’s not necessarily racist, she said, but “the problem is that it works against excellence.”

“These hires need to be conducted by people who are required to look at the good of the institution as a whole,” she said. “We need something top-down here.”

Today at 11:30 AM, Global Scholars Hall.

Dear Campus Community, Continue reading →

Excellent reporting. Read it all, here:

… Targeting low-income students helps diversity because minority students are statistically more likely to fall into the low-income bracket, according to Grant Schoonover, an adviser for Pathway Oregon.

“There’s a greater number of first generation and historically underrepresented students in that cross-section,” Schoonover said.

Students who qualify for Pathway Oregon get a promise from the university that any tuition and fees the federal Pell grant and state grants don’t cover, the UO will absorb.

… But much of this change in diversity could simply be because high schools are getting more diverse, says Peace Bransberger, a research analyst for the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

“If you look at the simple view, you’ll see that even from 2005… entering classes of students are more diverse,” Bransberger said.