Students activists at the University of Missouri, whose racially charged protests brought the campus to a near-standstill last fall and successfully forced the ouster of the school’s president, can check off another victory this week: Mizzou says it will meet their demands to increase faculty diversity.
Administrators announced Tuesday that the school – beset by its lowest freshman class in a decade – will spend $1 million over the next four years in an effort to double the number of faculty members from “historically underrepresented groups.” This, despite the fact that Mizzou’s former diversity chief earlier called such moves illegal and potentially discriminatory.
At a news conference, administrators outlined a “multi-pronged approach” to bring the number of minority faculty up from the current level of 6.7 percent to 13.4 percent over a period of four years, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune. Present at the conference were UM System Interim President Mike Middleton, Board of Curators Chair Pam Henrickson, UM System Chief Diversity Officer Kevin McDonald and Interim Chancellor Hank Foley.
McDonald said the bulk of the newly diverse faculty faces will come via new hires, but insisted that quotas will not used in the process. With faculty turnover of about 3 to 4 percent each year, McDonald said the school will be able to replace 235 to 315 of its almost 2,000 faculty members over four years. About 135 of those new hires will come from a pool of those “historically underrepresented groups.”
In an email to Heat Street on Wednesday, McDonald said historically underrepresented groups include African American, Hispanic/Latino/Latina, and Native American applicants.
“We certainly can increase the numbers significantly if we focus on that effort,” he said. “Admittedly the pool is small and there is great competition for the folks in that pool.”
Currently 5 percent of Mizzou’s faculty are African American, 3 percent are Latinx and 1 percent are Native American, McDonald said.
Mizzou will also invest $1 million of its intellectual property revenue to recruit minority postdoctoral fellows, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and some of those temporary employees could continue on to become tenure-track faculty.
Spouses of faculty recruits may also be offered employment at the university or assisted in finding work in the community through a dual-career assistance program.
“We just have to look at this in these multi-pronged approaches to reach, exceed or fall short of the goal, but at least we have a goal,” McDonald said.
The push for more diversity comes after weeks of racially charged protests and demonstrations in the fall of 2015 by black students complaining about a hostile climate for people of color on campus. A group calling themselves Concerned Student 1950 issued a list of eight demands of the university at the time that it said were not negotiable, among them that administrators institute “targeted hiring” for faculty.
Those demands, however, encountered fierce resistance from university officials at the time. Chuck Henson, interim vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equity at the time, called CS 1950’s demands for “targeted hiring” of black faculty “against state and federal law” and “a bad model for a sustainable community.”
“[H]iring faculty or staff, or admitting students based on protected characteristics to meet a numerical target, will not and cannot be done,” Henson said in a February letter addressed to CS 1950.
At the time Henson did not specify what specific laws the demands would violate. Henson, who has since stepped down from his interim role to focus on his faculty position in the School of Law, did not immediately respond to an email from Heat Street asking if the diversity effort announced Tuesday would be satisfactory.
Students active in the CS 1950 movement, many of whom have graduated or otherwise moved on, celebrated the decision:
ain't no squad like my squad #concernedstudent1950 https://t.co/BF8lRzpyc4
— AfricanaWomanist (@DevaSTating_14) September 14, 2016
