JON HELGASON/Arizona Summer Wildcat Anthony Beas (cover and above) works in the Cancer Center Molecular and Cellular Biology Lab at UMC. A recent biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology graduate, he will head to UCSD in the fall to continue his education, which he says may eventually lead him to seek out a professorship. If he joins the ranks of a university faculty, he would become part of what UA officials hope will be a rising number of minorities in the academic world.

Committees discuss increasing diversity; minority leaders remain skeptical

In the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Center, the walls are covered with native African art and the shelves hold books about the civil rights movement.

But for the students in the center, the representation of their culture at UA may not extend much deeper.

Less than 2 percent of UA faculty are black, making it rare for them to have an instructor of their race if their degree extends beyond African American Studies.

That realization has caught the eye of university administrators, who claim that the discrepancies stretch outside the black community and into all other racial minority groups, as well as women.

These findings, along with evidence that women and minority faculty are paid less on average than male professors, have bred talk of increased ãdiversityä on campus, with administrators touting their efforts at public forums.

President Peter Likins has said that the discrepancy in treatment and pay is a ãcall to serious responsibility from the university.ä

But with a handful of committees tackling the issue, few solutions have been presented and even fewer implemented.

The North Central Association, which accredits the university, is expecting a plan for UA by spring 2003 on how to increase diversity.

They made this request based on observations in 2000 when they found that UA was not in line with their expectations.

Baffled with defining and targeting diversity, faced with a deadline and tight on money in a statewide budget shortfall, officials are contemplating their next step.

Most of the universityâs top administrators agreed that spending about $120,000 to hire a vice-provost for diversity was a bold idea.

But when Likins and Provost George Davis publicized at a campus town hall meeting last November that despite a campus-wide hiring freeze, UA was actively seeking someone to fill this new position, eyebrows went up around campus.

Two months later the idea was discarded.

Diversity has been a spin word at nearly every faculty senate meeting and campus hall town for the past year, with administrators and university-deemed ãdiversity expertsä answering questions and touting taskforces.

Elizabeth Ervin, vice provost for academic affairs, said diversity is ãa Îcode wordâ for many different agendas.ä

ãI donât believe that diversity is really about one thing,ä Ervin said. ãItâs a pretty broad and inclusive thing.ä

ãFor a campus such as ours, diversity involves the demographics of students, staff, and faculty; the curricula and programs; issues of disability; belief systems, religion; socio-economic background,ä she added.

For the past six months, Ervin has been on sabbatical, entrusted by the president and provost to unravel this campus mystery that caught the eyes of the universityâs accreditors.

In that time, she has attended conferences, read literature on the topic and worked closely with researchers at Harvard University.

From this, she has begun to draw up a blueprint to deal with diversity, which she said ãis not a rigid plan, but more a toolkit of ideas and activities.ä

This ãtoolkit,ä which will be completed by the end of summer, will include one major change that Ervin emphasized as being a key to bringing more minorities to campus.

ãWe need to improve the way we do hiring ÷ seeking out women and people of color in our searches,ä Ervin said. ã(Right now) they · tend to be passive searches. We place the ad and wait for the applications to come. I would like to see more personal contact with women and people of color.ä

According to numbers from 2001, there are 2.4 male professors for every female, with male professors making an average of $12,361 more than females.

Eighty percent of faculty are white.

Those numbers have remained relatively unchanged for the past eight years and are slightly below the number average for research institutions, according to the chronicle of higher education.

In fact, Ervin said that currently the office of affirmative action identifies the number of minorities in given departments, but there is no accountability in seeing that the numbers change.

Patti Ota, vice president for executive affairs and university initiatives, said UA has historically been very ãdecentralized.ä

She said she would like to see the search process for faculty and staff evolve into something more pro-active. While avoiding specifics, Ota said that this restructuring of the recruiting process would not necessarily cost money.

Instead, she said it would be a process of ãmobilizing resources in a different way.ä

This would include, but would not be limited to, calling upon historically black universities when searching for faculty.

But Alex Wright, director of the African American Student Affairs Center, said that universities have traditionally held up their nose to graduates of those universities, favoring professors with degrees from high profile research institutions. Wright said he and other minority leaders on campus favored the vice provost plan.

ãYou can have as many committees as you want,ä he said. ãBut you need someone with some kind of power.ä

Stephen Gilliland, vice dean of the Eller College of Business and Public Administration, disagreed, saying the vice provost position was ãa bad idea.ä

He said the position would have shifted responsibilities over hiring away from deans and department heads.

Gilliland said resentment could come from people who see diversity as a novelty in the middle of university budget cuts.

He would like to see a plan that pulls lines of hiring from colleges that fail to increase diversity and rewards those that do.

In an e-mail to the campus community last week, Likins said he and Ota will ãcoordinate our diversity effortsä ÷ a statement reminiscent of the vice provost plan.

But Likins said that Ota will be playing a role different then that position would have.

ãWe need to find ways to coordinate campus wide efforts without controlling or suppressing local initiatives,ä he said.

Ota said she most likely will be entrusted with driving the UAâs diversity efforts, and that task will include bringing the many committees on diversity together.

Commenting on the number of committees, Ota said ãthat could be why we havenât seen a lot of results.ä

Socorro Carrizosa, director of Chicano Student Affairs, said UA is two years into its diversity efforts and there have been few results.

ãThese are not new issues,ä she said. ãThere have been task forces, there have been committees, and the university has not diversified its faculty.ä

The Grace Report and the Millennium Project both revealed that women and minorities throughout the university earn less money.

Those problems are solved through money, Likins said in the November Town Hall.

But the universityâs efforts are currently devoted to a more abstract concept, making the campus more diverse in the views and experiences of its faculty and staff and using race as an indicator.

UCLA Professor Mitchell Chang said that little to no research has been done to prove that a diverse faculty enhances the educational experience.

ãThe notion is that when the faculty is more diverse there is a greater tendency to use a wider range of teaching techniques, but there is no hard evidence,ä said Chang, a professor of higher education who has researched the effects of diversity on undergraduates.

He said that research, particularly out of Harvard University, has suggested diversity extends beyond race and gender and into things like economics and geography.

ãThe way (universities) use diversity is way too vague,ä he said.

Nevertheless, few are willing to say that diversity efforts in a general sense are misguided or unnecessary.

Rather the criticisms from Wright and Carrizosa and others passionate about the issue are in reference to the slow moving bureaucracy that they say diversity efforts seem to be trapped in.

Likins admitted that the UAâs diversity agenda has lacked ãcentral coordination.ä

ãWe are not satisfied with the results of our decentralized approach, but we must preserve the commitments of the many people involved now in this work,ä he said, adding that the ãdiversity coalitionä headed by Ota will serve as the place of those different commitments to merge.

In April, Davis and Likins sat before the UA community again, just like they had at that November town hall.

Like the last time, someone asked about diversity.

The question was about that vice provost for diversity position. The one that the UA had spent time and money touting ÷ and then axed.

ãWeâve learned, think before you act,ä Likins said.

And as administrators battle through committees, the plan to be presented in August could meet the same disapproval that the vice provost position met.

ãI suspect there will be resentment (to diversity plans),ä Ervin said. ãThere will always be people who will be dead set against any change, thinking it will hurt us.ä

Still, the deadline from North Central Approaches and administrators will be hard pressed over the next year to sell the community on their blueprint for success.

ãI believe we can meet the deadline, especially if we work on the accountability issue right away,ä Ervin said. ãI donât think we need a sophisticated, perfectly articulated plan so much as we need to show that the entire campus is serious about this, is doing something about it, has multiple initiatives in play, and is willing to be held accountable for its action, or lack of it.ä