April 06, 2016

LC CAS Faculty Diversity Proposal approved April 5, 2016

LC CAS Faculty Diversity Proposal is approved! Read the final proposal here.
The LC CAS Faculty Diversity Proposal was recently approved by more than 83% of faculty at the faculty meeting on Tuesday, April 5. Thank you all for supporting this important initiative. 

Please read the approved proposal below.

Printable PDF version is here.  

 

Proposal from Lewis & Clark College Faculty for Increasing Faculty and Curriculum Diversity 

We recognize and affirm the importance of diversity in all its forms, including race, ethnicity, national origin, socio-economic background, religious orientation or spirituality, physical or sensory disability, gender, and sexual orientation. This proposal highlights racial and ethnic diversity because our shortcomings in this particular area are severe. The two goals of increasing faculty diversity and curricular diversity are both important goals and they are distinct. We wholeheartedly support academic freedom and believe that diversity is an important foundation for truly open dialogue where everyone can express themselves. 

 

Faculty Diversity

Call for Immediate Responses with Current Institutional Resources

1) • Analyze demographic hiring data from the last five years and present results to faculty to see if the problem lies in recruiting a diverse pool or in making the hire. Continue yearly or more frequent reports to faculty by Dean on progress toward goal.

2) • Given that our current policy only allows fast-tracking an underrepresented candidate after a position has been approved, and that since its creation in 2009 nobody has been hired under its restrictive guidelines, we request the revision of the Opportunity hiring policy to make it more effective; we also request four new positions that could only be used by departments and programs to hire candidates uniquely qualified to further the strategic goals of the college.

3) • Continue to use existing pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships to attract promising candidates to LC with the goal of hiring them if they prove to be viable candidates.

Call for Statements of Institutional Commitment

4) • The current CAS tenure-line faculty is 86 percent non-Latino white. Establish the goal, over the next five years, of increasing the proportion of non-white and Latino faculty, both US and foreign, with special attention given to those groups who are woefully underrepresented, specifically black and Native American. The aspirational goal would be to create a faculty that better reflects the world. Charge the Dean of the College with developing a more precise goal for increasing diversity at the College recognizing the limitations of the doctoral pipeline and the realities of the market. We ask the Dean to commit the resources required to adequately engage in a robust, deliberate, long-term recruiting and hiring strategy.

 

Diversifying Curriculum and Pedagogy

Call for Immediate Responses with Current Resources

5) • We encourage efforts to diversify the curriculum by hiring faculty, when appropriate, who teach in fields that are underrepresented in the curriculum. These fields include but are not limited to geographical lacunae such as Africa and the Middle East, and the study of racially marginalized cultures in the United States.

6) • Continue to diversify first-year curriculum within the current Exploration & Discovery program, specifically by encouraging robust inclusion on the syllabi of underrepresented identities, histories, and experiences. We also recognize that “canonical” texts are often precisely those that address tolerance, inclusion, and experiences of marginalization, under-, or mis-representation. Thus we encourage faculty to continue their efforts to read canonical texts in a context of support for open inquiry.

7) • Prioritize diversification of the curriculum with respect to underrepresented identities, histories, and experiences in the upcoming process of reviewing and revising the College’s first-year and general education requirements.

Call for Statements of Institutional Commitment

8) • Solicit outside funding to allow current faculty time to work on including issues of race and ethnicity in their current courses or to develop new courses that attend to these issues. Establish pedagogical workshops for all faculty to address issues of diversity and inclusion both in and out of the classroom so that all faculty, especially faculty of color, are supported in doing this important work.

9) • Maintain a high-level administrator with the responsibility to push forward efforts to diversify faculty and the curriculum, and to report back to the faculty and community at least once a year.

10) • Encourage the College to enhance and seek donors to contribute to the Diversity Fund.