Plenary 7A

Shirley Ramirez at Plenary 7a From Future Diversity Conference 2008.

Faculty as Agents for Institutional Collaboration and Transformation

From the 2008 Conference: The Future of Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education

Held on December 5, 2008 from 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM

The following resources and materials are available for this session:

Panelists
Thematic Summary & Analysis
Photo Album (right)
PowerPoint Presentations
Session Transcript
Related Articles

Panelists

Cheryl Wall, Professor, Co-Chair President’s Council on Institutional Diversity and Equity, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities and former Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, Columbia University
Shirley Ramirez, Vice President for Institutional Planning and Diversity, Middlebury College
Wanda Ward, Deputy Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources, National Science Foundation

Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Associate Professor, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Thematic Summary & Analysis

Ben Sifuentes-Jauregui (Associate Professor, American Studies and Comparative Literature, Rutgers) opened this panel asking what faculty members’ responsibilities are in advancing diversity and higher education. He raised a further question about how faculty can combine their power and institutional knowledge with their responsibility for and ethical imperatives to increase diversity in higher education?

Promoting Structural Change

Drawing on their institutional knowledge of universities, participants highlighted the importance of structural changes to transform higher education into a more diverse environment. Shirley Ramirez (Vice President for Institutional Planning and Diversity, Middlebury College) expressed the need to integrate positions like Chief Diversity Officer with the university’s strategic planning, especially around capital campaigns and development. Coming from a larger, more decentralized university, Jean Howard asked how one could make the most of a decentralized structure by branding the whole university with a diversity agenda, highlighting all the different initiatives underway and encouraging the university to see itself fundamentally differently. The panelists generally agreed the challenge was to figure out how to get diversity initiatives to live and breathe in every pocket of institutions of higher education.

Diversity Work as Intellectual Work

Building on this idea of structural changes in universities, Cheryl Wall (Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, Rutgers) emphasized the need to ensure that diversity work is understood to be intellectual work. Wall emphasized that diversity programs must be encountered as academic programs that are at the core of the university’s mission. In this same vein, Shirley Ramirez described a structural change at Middlebury through the creation of an academically charged Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity (instead of a multicultural student center), a change that she felt created a strong academic force for diversity initiatives among both students and faculty.

Connecting Information and Action

To look strategically at the institutional structure of universities and know where to target resources most effectively, Jean Howard (George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University) emphasized the need to collect, analyze and use both quantitative and qualitative data. Data, Howard pointed out, enables you to know where in the university to put pressure and also lets you know when to celebrate. “Numbers can be exhilarating!” she said. Howard described in more detail the efforts of Columbia’s Diversity Initiative to collect data on all the named chairs in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences in order to plan where new chairs from the capital campaign should go and how faculty recruitment should be targeted. She emphasized also the need for more data on how to attract and retain faculty of color.

Creating “Innovation Ecosystems"

Federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation can be strong and active partners in this work, and Wanda Ward (Deputy Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources, National Science Foundation) described the NSF’s support of work on innovation ecosystems, or environments that foster innovation and creativity. The challenges of, and opportunities for, creating supportive environments struck a chord with the panelists and other participants. Participants and panelists raised the importance of affinity groups and mentoring programs that can support faculty of color in navigating around the obstacles to advancement in higher education advancement and fulfilling their goals. Part of that support can include more attention to the work-life balance issues that junior faculty face, limiting committee assignments, and cluster hiring of faculty posses. Another part of this effort can include connecting these faculty efforts with activist efforts on and off campus, paying attention to the larger environment or climate of action around diversity that can create a more supportive atmosphere for diverse faculty.

Together the panelists emphasized that this work can be most effective when it is faculty driven and strategicially structurally situated to have the most impact. Strong data collection, analysis and use emerged as a crucial tool to target diversity efforts and recognize successful initiatives. Finally, the environment universities create for diverse faculty is crucial to retention.