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| Standard 4.2 Experiences Working with Diverse Faculty
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Faculty Experiences
Faculty members have successful and relevant K-12 public school and other diverse experiences. Faculty expertise runs the full gamut of working with students from varied backgrounds, e.g., bilingual students, lesbian, gay and transgendered students, Native American students in reservation schools, students in urban schools, transition programs, second language acquisition, sign language, street youth, abused youth, every category of special education student, and every aspect of special education instruction.
Additionally, faculty have backgrounds in establishing special education camps and schools, founding an orphanage in Mexico, establishing a children's foundation in Thailand, receiving awards for advocacy, conducting scholarship on topics such as literacy, gender, race, behavioral disorders, and early intervention, and participating in a host of other experiences from which they draw in preparing candidates to work with all students. (Complete faculty records are available in the on-site exhibit room.)
Faculty Diversity
The unit maintains a diverse faculty despite a limited number of applicants and an increasing number of faculty retirements. Faculty diversity in the College of Education compares to or exceeds available national percentages for SCDE's. It is also comparable to faculty diversity across the university; in the case of tenure track faculty it exceeds that of the university.
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For female faculty, national reports, put percentages as low as 30%. The College of Education overall percentage is 57%. When only tenure track faculty are considered, the percentage of female faculty rises to 61%. For minority faculty, national reports estimate the percentage to be around 10%, slightly below the 11.7% figure in the College of Education overall. Among tenure track faculty, however, the percentage of minority faculty rises to 17.7% in the College of Education. During the past academic year, three new tenure track positions were filled by an Asian female, an African American female, and an African American male.
Besides race and gender, College of Education faculty also represent diverse cultures, religions, ages, sexual orientations, and countries of origin that include Colombia, Japan, Korea, and India. This table shows that unit faculty exceed university figures for female faculty and, among tenure track faculty, also exceed university figures for race and ethnicity:
Faculty Recruitment and Retention Strategies
The unit has employed several strategies to increase the number of minority faculty:
- All faculty, especially minority faculty, make special efforts at professional conferences to meet potential candidates for open positions. An example of a search that was filled using this strategy was the new TESOL position.
- The Dean is diligent about participating in events that are likely to draw candidates from diverse backgrounds such as the 2005 fall conference sponsored by the ACE Center for Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Equity. The Dean's attendance at the 7th Annual Joint Fellows Conference resulted in recruiting for and subsequently filling the Early Childhood Education position.
- Adjunct faculty who have taught within the unit are especially viable candidates for tenure track positions. An example occurred this past academic year when we were able to hire a minority faculty member for Educational Research who had the doctorate and had been teaching successfully in the unit in a part-time capacity.
- The Provost's Office provides assistance in funding positions when faculty from under-represented groups become known to us. In recent years, these efforts assisted with hiring three of the current eight tenure track minority faculty members.
- The university makes concerted efforts to improve climate and retention of diverse populations. Examples of recent activities include the two-hour online conference for deans and chairs on Best Practices in Recruiting and Retaining Diverse Faculty and the recent large-scale Campus Diversity Study that assessed the diversity climate for faculty, staff and students.
- The unit subscribes to all university efforts to increase faculty diversity, e.g., minority representation on all search committees, postings in Black Issues in Higher Education and Women in Higher Education, search committee trainings on fair search procedures, and implementation of university guidelines for affirmative action and fair hiring practices.
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