Press ReleaseContact: Linda Granell(909) 335-5195[email protected]Ref. # 01-39
Nov. 13, 2000
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO DIVERSITY
Universities nationwide struggle with efforts to diversify their faculties. The University of Redlands found a way by diversifying its curriculum. As a result, five newly budgeted faculty positions--the first new positions authorized on the campus in 10 years--all have been filled by persons of color.
"We felt we had always done everything right in our efforts for diversity--representation on search committees, advertising in appropriate publications, networking, etc.--and we still had far less than the results we would hope," said Nancy Carrick, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "It wasn't the way we go about searches that was at fault. We started to think instead that we couldn't do the same kind of searches."
Faculty recruitments often are restricted by curricular needs, especially at smaller universities such as Redlands where departments may house fewer than 10 professors. If the government department, for example, loses its theorist, it must hire another, thus limiting the pool of candidates to available scholars in that area.
The five new positions were crafted to reflect the university's increasingly interdisciplinary approach to learning and were broadly defined so that a potential professor could mold the position to his or her interests, rather than being cubby-holed to teach certain classes.
The job description for a position in philosophy, for example, began, "Area of specialization: Latin American, Asian, African or African-American philosophy. Area of competence: open."
"I actually didn't know that this was part of a larger program to bring diversity into the curriculum until after I was hired," said Sawa Becker, assistant professor of anthropology. "What attracted me was the way the job description was written for someone who does interregional studies. A lot of job descriptions are very specific to a discipline or area of the world. My interest is in studying how people in different parts of the world interact with each other. The university itself and the department were looking for someone interregional and interdisciplinary, and that's exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my life."
Faculty from the initiative are teaching new courses this fall such as Central American Fiction, Introduction to Latin American Studies, Comparative Ethics East and West, and The Black Atlantic.
Carrick noted, however, that the professors not only add new academic interests but enhance existing courses, particularly introductory courses.
"Students have new opportunities to be taught from the unique perspectives of very interesting people," she said.
"One of the things that often is lost in efforts to diversify is that we are attempting to bring intellectual diversity to the academy," agreed Margaret Wilkerson, a 1959 Redlands alumna. Wilkerson is director of media, art and culture for the Ford Foundation in New York, a professor of African-American studies at UC Berkeley and a member of the university's board of trustees.
"We enrich our lives and work in the academy only to the extent that we open up to the values and experiences that diverse voices bring. I applaud what Redlands has done," she said.
Keith Osajima, associate professor of education and director of race and ethnic studies, worked closely with Carrick on the initiative and chaired one of the search committees.
"We disproved all those myths: that there aren't people out there, that they don't want to come to Redlands, that we would have to buy them," Osajima said. He added that he hoped the success of the initiative would have a positive influence on admission of students of color and on future faculty hiring practices.
"This is going to change the nature of the faculty," Osajima said. "More people will have diversity as a priority and have a say in how we define positions in the future."
Osajama and Carrick both said that the initiative was, in fact, more successful than they had imagined.
"We did not start this saying we're going to add five faculty of color," Carrick said. "We followed the academic hiring process through all of its steps--departmental proposals, personnel policies, curriculum committee, search committees. We changed how we defined positions, but not the process. In the end, we hired our first choice for every position."
Osajima added that retention of the faculty now becomes a priority as well.
While time will tell, one of the new professors was encouraged. "I can't think of anything the university hasn't done to make us feel welcome and supported," said Arturo Arias, a professor recruited from San Francisco State to direct the Program in Latin American Studies.
Also hired through the initiative were Julius Bailey, assistant professor of race and ethnic studies (he arrives fall 2001); Xinyan Jiang, assistant professor of philosophy; and Kimberly Welch, assistant professor of Latin American Studies.###
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