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Report on UC Faculty Hiring

Unprecedented Urgency is a report documenting gender (and some racial) bias in UC faculty hiring and the history of attempts to address it. The report draws on hiring statistics as well as the experiences of UC faculty members.
Here are examples of bias from two different UC campuses:
     We openly tape recorded our meetings with faculty, chairs, deans and other administrators 
     including the chancellor. A dean in the sciences, speaking on the record, described the inability 
     to diversify his faculty. He said of African American scholars (having hired one in the past),
     that they had tried "them" but "they" had not worked out.
     He suggested that he and his faculty did not feel it was a good idea to introduce someone to
    the group who was different from the others and, therefore, might feel uncomfortable and out
    of place and might have a negative experience. Even in my own department, a male faculty
    member, somewhat younger than I, suggested at a faculty meeting discussing the hiring of
    women, "We should try them out in the visiting lecturer positions." I asked him
    rhetorically if he had been tried out as a visiting lecturer prior to joining the ladder ranks of the
    faculty? When he replied, "no," he reddened and must have realized the absurdity
    of his suggestion.
                (Unprecedented Urgency, p. 20)
A major effort to address bias was the state audit of UC faculty hiring (see Spring 2001 Newsletter). One of the audit´s recommendations was that UC search committees file written search plans. The report notes:
     Such written plans had been required under federal employment regulations since at least 
     1978. How was it possible that some UC campuses were failing to comply with these relatively
     simple legal requirements? No wonder the campuses were in widespread non-compliance with
     the more difficult federal requirements of making "good faith efforts" to meet
     parity goals and reduce the under-representation of women on the faculty.
               (Unprecedented Urgency pp. 38_39)


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