Poor Minority Hiring Practices May Cost Nebraska College
LINCOLN, Neb. —  State Legislators here warned the University of Nebraska-Lincoln last month that the school will lose state funding if it fails to meet goals set by lawmakers for hiring minority faculty members.
"The Legislature insists that the university meet the benchmarks — or suffer the consequences," states a resolution passed last month by the state Committee on Gender and Minority Equity. But state Sen. Deb Suttle says it's not a threat.
"It is a pleading, if you will, for them to please do this," says Suttle, chairwoman of the committee. "It's an encouragement."
Lawmakers want the university to rank in the top half of peer institutions for employing women and minority faculty by 2002. If the school falls short of that goal set in 1997, it will lose 1 percent of its state funding, or more than $3 million.
Records show that the university falls in the top 50 percent of similar-sized institutions in hiring women faculty but lags in hiring minorities. The university increased its minority faculty from 8.9 percent in 1997 to 10.1 percent last year.

Regents Select Former Protester as Student Representative

LOS ANGELES — A University of California at Los Angeles graduate student who once was arrested for disrupting a regents meeting to protest its affirmative action ban was selected last month as the regents' student representative.
A  committee chose Justin W. Fong from a pool of 10 candidates for the one-year post.
Police arrested Fong and several other students during a July 1995 regents meeting where they were protesting the board's ban on affirmative action in student admissions, faculty and staff hiring and contracting. Fong was cited and released. Charges were never filed. "The incident is behind me," he says. "I'm now looking forward to working with the regents … to make sure the university is a better place."