Diversity Blueprints

The recommendations included in the complete subcommittee reports are the product of many individuals and groups at the University of Michigan. In the interest of an inclusive, community-wide conversation, we have shared the full set of subcommittee materials as well as the many suggestions sent to the Task Force by students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members. Specific recommendations reflect this diverse input, and do not necessarily represent the consensus of the entire Diversity Blueprints Taskforce nor the official position and approach of the University.

Faculty and Staff Recruitment and Retention Subcommittee

Diversity Blueprints Task Force
University of Michigan
February 15, 2007

Download this report as a 100K .pdf*

Members:
Rebekah Ashley
Catherine Benamou
Carol Hollenshead
Philip Deloria (Co-chair)
Kevin Gaines
David Gordon
Patricia Gurin
Donney Moroney
David Munson
Robert Ortega
Joe Schwarz
Nicole Stallings
Amy Stillman
Laurita Thomas (Co-chair)
Theresa Tran
Anthony Walesby
Mieko Yoshihama
Venice T. Sule provided research assistance

Key Issues and Challenges

Basic Recruitment Issues:

Retention Issues:

Critical Mass and Climate issues:

Mentoring and workload issues:

Structural issues:

Key Strategies

  1. Information and Data
    • Extend Affirmative Action information gathering practices to faculty hiring. The University Affirmative Action plan sets concrete goals, indexed to an available regional and national demographic, with the assumption that a diverse and excellent pool will produce a similar demographic among employees. This data—mandated by our status as a federal contractor—offers opportunities for us to leverage information in the interests of diversity hiring and retention. Our suspicion is that, on the faculty side, most units are unaware of this data and that it might help shape their considerations in hiring. Not only should the information be extended to the individual hiring units (e.g., department chairs), but expectations need to be stated by the Provost’s Office that efforts to improve the diversity of the candidate pools will be scrutinized with the same care as the academic qualifications of the candidate finally appointed.
    • More effective information development and sharing for faculty hiring pools. Units are uneven in practice in terms of gathering Affirmative Action information about faculty hiring pools. Some continue to collect mail-in cards; others do not. If this information gathering procedure could be standardized, gathered electronically, and communicated to faculty hiring committees during a search, committees could be asked for greater accountability in their efforts to create diverse pools, and could use the data in ongoing efforts to recruit candidates to those hiring pools.
    • Using data in establishing accountability. Although our sense is that the Provost’s office uses diversity data in College-level budget meetings, we are less certain that Colleges hold units accountable in rigorous ways. One might imagine a generalized incentive system, to be sure, but also a formal and structured consideration of diversity in College-level evaluation of key performance indicators.
    • Identify other groups which should come under the Affirmative Action guidelines (e.g., house officers in the Health System) and create similar programs to enhance the candidate pools in these areas. Consider hiring a general faculty search firm as consultants to help us attain better uniformity in approaches to enhancing the diversity of our candidate pools. Many departments and units would like to do this but don’t know how.
    • Track our gains and losses in diversity hiring and retention over time in order to create a clear picture of units that succeed and those that do not. Such data might be used both to develop and disseminate best practices strategies, and as part of accountability measures. A contemporary climate survey should be compared to the climate survey conducted a decade ago by the Center for the Education of Women, in order to track longitudinal change.
  2. Recruitment
    • Implement ADVANCE search manual and STRIDE training campus-wide for all faculty and all upper-level staff searches.
    • Develop targeted missions and initiatives that can be directly related to recruitment (e.g., A Center for the Improvement of Health Among Underserved and Disadvantaged Populations would be a natural home for minority and majority people wanting to pursue careers in this arena). Having tangible missions about which the University cares about to which it devotes resources is a strong recruitment and retention tool.
    • Review and enhance previous “cluster hiring” efforts, in relation to such targeted initiatives and in fields in which cluster hires can be used to build immediate “critical mass.” Many candidates are successfully recruited because they know they will be joined immediately by colleagues with similar interests.
    • Long Term Pipeline Relationships: Need to start with doctoral education; form an alliance of top-tier Universities and diversity institutions, and work together toward ways of preparing doctoral graduates for academic life and the tenure process. One example of this may be found in the CIC American Indian Studies Program, which brings together students working in this field across the CIC institutions and, in effect, creates a pool of potential faculty members which has been collectively mentored by multiple individuals from multiple institutions.
    • Immediate Pipeline: Recruit Underrepresented Minority Post-Docs to transition into Tenure Track Positions (modeled on the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at the University of California and elsewhere).
    • Review recruitment practices for staff, with an eye toward new best practices focused on pipeline. These might include apprenticeships, rotating internships that allow prospective employees a thorough understanding of a unit, coaching and assistance to temporary employees who might become permanent, the offering of clear career ladders, and the creation of scholarship opportunities for further education. As an educational institution, we need to value education for all, and this includes staff.
    • Internships/Cross-Training. Review practice on campus. Develop formal programs for staff to gain knowledge and expertise in other areas on campus.
  3. Climate Issues
    • Information Gathering and Training: Spread centralized compilations of “best practices” mentoring across campus as a whole. Explore formal mentoring for staff and review effectiveness of faculty mentors as it relates to tenure and other issues. Scattered across campus are a number of effective mentoring programs and practices for faculty and staff. ADVANCE offers an excellent example, well known in the sciences, but less visible among humanities. One can imagine a flow of information moving from diverse campus locations into a central clearinghouse, and then moving back out again as a manual or handbook for mentoring for diverse faculty and staff. Mentoring is also more practical if you have a mission to mentor towards.
    • Create a Diversity Ambassadors network throughout the University. The Ambassadors meet together to share their knowledge and expertise in developing and using diverse workgroups, to network, and to increase their own skills and knowledge. In addition, Ambassadors will be part of an email group that will be used to announce upcoming events, newly available resources, best practices and other pertinent issues. Facilitation and team development training for ambassadors will be offered to increase their ability to handle potential “hot button” diversity issues.
    • Climate survey especially designed to assess specific issues of diversity, aimed at both strengths and areas of concern. For example, Budget & Finance conducts surveys of its employees to gain a better understanding of issues and concerns regarding the working climate. Explore conducting a similar survey campus-wide, although with close attention to issues of accountability and confidentiality note that isolated faculty or staff may be easily identified in reporting results).
    • Retention interviews. Similar to employee surveys, conduct interviews with staff (perhaps on an annual or semi-annual basis) to determine if any issues/concerns exist before the employee starts to think about finding other employment. Again, with attention to accountability and confidentiality. This would seem to require training on the part of those conducting such interviews.
    • Exit Interviews. Faculty and staff departing the university should be interviewed by an appropriate administrator, in order to determine climate issues that may have led to a departure, possible remedies, strategies that would have kept the faculty member or employee at Michigan.
    • Employee orientation. Review current orientation programs for employees. Explore expanding the time alloted to include discussions about the importance of diversity to the campus, and who and what we believe in.
    • Staff supervisor and Faculty Chair training. Recognize that the unit level is where most climate issues play out, and put more attention there. Require training for all new staff supervisors to ensure a welcoming and supportive environment/climate exists within units. Such training would be modeled off of the current Foundations of Supervision conducted by HRD. Faculty Chairs often receive only a single day training session, combined with ongoing “just in time” training to equip them to handle seasonal issues (budget, hiring, salary, partner, etc.). Faculty chair training could be more robust in general, and included in such training should be strategies and issues having to do with diversity faculty, staff, and partner issues.
    • Evaluation and Recognition of Differential Service, Teaching, and Research Demands. This area boils down to a simple idea: respect for those engaged in diversity forms of scholarship, teaching, service, and work. Too many of our departed colleagues and staffers observe that retention efforts represented “too little, too late,” in relation to what they have perceived as an ongoing climate in which their efforts were not necessarily greeted with hostility per se, but were not accorded respect, particularly in light of the difficulties and time demanded by their work.
    • Establish opportunities in which to mix more effectively constructive criticism with significant gestures of recognition and appreciation. Many faculty and staff experience reviews (annual, third-year, tenure) as disciplinary moments, laden with anxiety and bad feelings. Successful conclusions of reviews might be marked in significant ways as moments of “re-recruitment,” through letters of appreciation from deans and supervisors, gestures of recognition, small increases in research account funds, and the like.
    • Implement flexibility and resource strategies (tenure clock, manuscript workshops, community research funding) to ease the burden of joint appointments and problems encountered by emergent scholarship. We should continue to support interdisciplinarity, as it often goes hand in hand with work that is intellectual diverse and that helps create a diverse faculty. At the same time, we need to support interdisciplinary/diversity faculty with joint appointments through flexibility around tenure (a simple request to delay the tenure clock, if necessary, to recognize challenges emerging from structural [joint appointment] interdisciplinarity), scholarly workshops that help situate and refine work in relation to and across evaluative disciplines, and research support for work that may not be as easily funded through standard channels.
    • Recognize team scholarship efforts. Since many diverse faculty may be working across units, many of their contributions may not be captured by our traditional foci, which tend to lead us to ask question such as “What first or senior authored papers have your completed? What are the grants on which you are the principal investigator?” We need to evaluate significant scholarly contributions in new ways. The Medical School for example, is exploring ways of doing this.
    • Recognize emergent or community-based scholarship. It seems likely that major pieces of the academic research paradigm will shift in the future, as institutions (particularly institutions with a state support and a service obligation to local and regional populations) seek to be ever more relevant to their immediate citizenry. Michigan can take the lead on the formal recognition of local, collaborative, and community service scholarship, even as we recognize the impending transformations in the book and article culture that has driven much academic evaluation in the past.
    • Recognize the challenges of diversity teaching. Consider ways of evaluating teaching performance that acknowledges diversity focus in pedagogy; consider incentives for innovations
    • Recognize Service Obligations. Certain types of service — beyond the ordinary committee assignments — should be taken into account at the time of tenure and promotion, particularly when that service is “built into” the position occupied by the faculty member even if such service does not factor into the salary merit review procedure. More important than overwork for minority faculty is the lack of recognition and awareness of that work on the part of review committees. One idea might be to consider a two-tier service system, in which basic service obligations might be separated out from the often extraordinary service work frequently placed upon diversity faculty. Certain rewards and incentives could be attached to service work that falls into the category of “institution building” or “diversity retention and recruiting.”
    • Clarify and strengthen role of student support services. Staff and faculty often take on (willingly) too much responsibility in terms of individual mentoring and student services issues. A strong set of student services organizations aimed at diversity students is necessary, as is a clearer sense of where responsibilities lie.
  4. Social and General Climate
    • Address the various definitions of diversity used on campus, in order to create a more effective understanding of what it means for all stakeholders. Conduct educational forums to achieve effective dissemination of information.
    • Return, in some measures, to “infusion” model of diversity across campus. Ensure that all major committees have a diverse membership, and that administrators across campus respect diversity values.
    • Ask Alumni Association to consider establishing and enhancing social networking opportunities for diversity faculty and staff, both within the university and outside. We do not see the university as a matchmaker, but we also recognize that for many diversity faculty and staff members, Ann Arbor poses significant challenges to the development of social networks and the location of romantic partners. Many younger faculty and staff members are accustomed to various electronic networking sites, which might lead one to propose a “faculty facebook” program, mixing professional and personal, and perhaps extending outward to include alumni.
    • Use public art and display to make diversity interests and commitments a more visible part of the campus. We simply think that physical environment is an important part of climate and retention.
  5. Attention to Structural Issues
    • Create intentional structures for identifying individuals critical to diversity efforts, recognize and support their efforts, and encourage them to train successors.
    • Create pipeline opportunities and leadership development opportunities for mid-level staff in order to replace the strong cohort now in upper level administration, but which is slated for retirement in the near future.
    • Establish staff management training that makes visible clear career ladders. Invest in our own people, in order to create our own pools for promotion to higher-level staff positions.
    • Identify and support keystone individuals among staff who have made significant contributions to diversity pipeline and hiring. Create opportunities though which others can learn from their expertise.
    • Recruit equivalent senior “anchor faculty” to support diversity initiatives at junior ranks. Encourage colleges to recognize the toll that is taken on units when diversity faculty members are recruited to academic administration, and to work with units to counteract or compensate for those negative effects. Create incentives for senior faculty and staff to mentor and support mid-career colleagues. This might take the form of personal recognition (awards, etc.) but also structural support (research support, internships)
    • Attention to faculty and staff who might ordinarily not be thinking of diversity issues. Place diversity values on orientation programs for new employees, with follow up training. Create diversity liaisons to establish lines of communication between ongoing diversity steering organizations and faculty and staff in general.
    • Establish comprehensive diversity resource web clearinghouse able to offer a wide range of strategies and possibilities for a diverse group of diversity interests. Survey existing structures and programs, consolidate information, and establish incentives for their diffusion into new areas and their strengthening in areas in which such programs already exist. These might take the shape of one-on-one career mentorships, training partnerships, leadership coaching programs, awards and recognitions, or explicit programmatic training of future administrative leaders.
    • Understand and work with demographic changes in existing staff and available pools. In skilled trades areas, for instance, a large cohort is scheduled for retirement over the next decade. Knowing this, we could create specific programs—intern and apprenticeships, recruiting efforts—aimed directly at building diversity into the pool of replacement workers.
    • Establish the profile of the University as a “minority-friendly” institution in the State of Michigan. Support for research, field trips, and extramural teaching and mentoring at diverse locations in the state can lead to the kind of contact that will attract diverse applicants for staff positions. Special funding and incentives should be available for efforts at city-to-city, “statewide,” and regional engagement, beyond “community service” opportunities for students. Conversely, emphasis on an “Ivory Tower” profile can discourage many highly qualified and talented candidates for staff positions from applying — even in positions where a special cultural or social profile is desirable.
    • Review wage structures — and the competitiveness of these wages — in certain staff categories. To give an example, media technicians at Washtenaw Community College have historically earned higher wages than UM media technicians; knowledge of uneven wage structures or noncompetitive wage structures at UM might discourage candidates from applying.
    • Disseminate Research. Program a yearly University-wide series of colloquia or symposia on intellectual diversity so that new research initiatives and research findings can be profiled and shared across disciplines. These colloquia and symposia would provide an indirect way of gauging the University’s progress in building and broadening internal diversity.
    • PFIP. Maintaining the basic initiatives of what has been a very successful program is critical. Can PFIP undertake a broader mandate in terms of recruitment and retention?
      • Create opportunities to harden or bridge PFIP lines. If a unit loses a PFIP faculty member, for example, allow the base funding for that line to remain in the unit, either during a bridge period, or permanently, in order to encourage replacement strategies. A two-year bridge would allow a unit to support replacement teaching and the launching of a search.
      • When PFIP is used for dual career support for diversity faculty, consider greater flexibility beyond the three-year “third-third-third” formula. In cases in which partners find themselves “starting over again” after an initial PFIP effort (following, say, a lecturership, post-doc, or soft money appointment), allow a renewable request to PFIP. Consider a cycle longer than three years, or with greater variability.
      • Use PFIP support to incent and reward units able to hire diversity faculty into non-PFIP lines.
      • When a PFIP faculty member enters upper academic administration (College or Provost level), find ways in which the unit can be compensated in order to bridge that gap. This might take the form of a unit proposal to the appropriate Dean and the Provost, or a top-down strategy that colleges would adopt in relation to the units that provide them faculty for administrative jobs.
      • Make more readily known the fact that PFIP extends beyond faculty hiring, to post-docs, librarians, CRLT, and other instances in which the university has an opportunity to recruit people who can create an important presence on campus. Consider using PFIP to recruit staff diversity anchors.

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