Provost Lawrence Dumas and other members of the Faculty Diversity Committee discussed ways to use the $1 million set aside for increasing faculty diversity with about 25 students Tuesday night at the Multicultural Center.
Committee members are considering many proposals for using the money, pledged by administrators during Fall Quarter after the committee released a report showing that Northwestern needs to recruit and retain more female, black and Latino faculty members. But students at the forum raised their own ideas for diversifying faculty.
Weinberg junior Howard Lien asked members of the panel if money to aid the diversity could come from NU’s $3.6 billion endowment.
“It’s good that they’re spending $1 million to increase diversity, but you have to look at it in the context of the university’s total spending,” Lien said. “A million dollars is a good first step.”
But Dumas said the pledge is a stronger statement than a standing fund, which would be taken for granted.
“If that’s your only approach to diversity, you’re not asking (the university) to buy into it,” Dumas said. “You have to have something to catalyze it.”
Students also questioned administrators’ focus on black and Latino hiring, but Dumas said those groups are only a starting place.
“We decided that, given the woefully low numbers of Latino and African American faculty and the woefully low numbers of Latino and African American students pursuing the Ph.D., that’s where we should start,” Dumas said.
He added that the effort eventually will move toward increasing Asian faculty. Asian faculty members constitute 7.3 percent of faculty but are concentrated in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, he said.
“It’s not fair, and it’s not fair because there is a need,” Dumas said of the low number of Asian faculty in humanities disciplines. “It’ll get there.”
Some schools already are succeeding in attempts to diversify faculty, Medill Associate Dean Mary Ann Weston said. The Medill School of Journalism recently hired two black faculty members, she said. Jacquelyn Thomas will begin as an associate professor in the Integrated Marketing and Communications program this fall. The school also recently re-hired Charles Whitaker, who left in 2000.
Sociology Prof. Mary Pattillo, who moderated the discussion, told the audience that NU’s peer institutions also need to increase diversity.
“Northwestern is decidedly average when it comes to the hiring of minorities,” Pattillo said. “We might not be at the top of the heap, but we’re certainly not at the bottom.”
Proposals for increasing diversity submitted to the committee have included funding the research of minority faculty candidates before they are hired and increasing the pool of minority doctoral students. Increasing the number of NU’s minority graduate and doctoral students would give NU a larger immediate pool to work with when hiring faculty, administrators said.
Faculty and students said they welcome an increase in minority students and faculty to alleviate pressures and responsibilities on them. Because of the small number of black female professors, the same people are called on constantly to help with projects, Pattillo said.
“Those are the kind of things you do that take one or two hours here or there,” she said. “I think most of us do it as a labor of love, but then at the last minute you think, ‘That’s why I couldn’t write that book.'”
