Currently, the campus administration is focusing much of its efforts on increasing the applicant pool and creating a pipeline of Ph.D. students to become UR faculty.
For the fiscal year of 2008, the university pledged $400,000 for special opportunity hires. For fiscal year 2009, the university plans to pledge $500,000 to recruit diverse faculty from underrepresented groups.
In 2007, Dr. Joann Moody, a leading expert in faculty diversity, was asked to advise university officials on expanding the applicant pool and preventing unconscious bias from permeating the hiring process. Those lessons were incorporated into a hiring resource package.
“College is supposed to prepare its students for the real world. The real world is diverse, and we are not being exposed to that,” Harrison says.
UR is not alone in its struggles to have a more diverse faculty. In 2005, underrepresented minority faculty made up only 16.5 percent of all full-time faculty at degree-granting institutions and the numbers have experienced little growth since then.Click here to post and read comments
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