A University of California multi-campus initiative strives to boost diversity within its STEM teaching faculty ranks

California is among the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the U.S., often coming in first, or vying with Hawaii for the top spot. And this quality is particularly obvious in the student body of the University of California system.

However, this mixture of races and cultures is not reflected in the UC teaching ranks, which is an issue if the goal is to bring out the best in everyone who invests a UC education.

Recent numbers compiled by the National Science Foundation indicate that across all four-year colleges in the country, racial and ethnic minority STEM associate and full professors occupy only about 8% of senior faculty positions, and the proportion drops to 6% in the country’s most research-intensive institutions.

“As the UC diversifies in terms of its student population, we’re not seeing the same representation in the faculty itself,” said UCSB assistant teaching professor Mike Wilton, a biologist whose work centers around finding ways to boost undergraduate student success in the STEM fields.

“We know that representation matters, and we have this mismatch of faculty demographics relative to the undergraduates they’re instructing,” he said. “We don’t have role models or representation for these individuals.”

The difference is made even more stark considering UCSB’s status as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), where the undergraduate Latinx population constitutes at least a quarter of the total undergrad population.

To reduce this discrepancy, a four-UC campus initiative, called the UC Hiring Interventions for Representation and Equity (HIRE) Alliance, is taking a look at early-career faculty hiring practices with the intention of increasing Latinx representation in its teaching ranks.

UCSB, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine are participating in the program, which is supported by the NSF’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP). All the participating campuses are current or emerging HSIs.

“What we’re trying to do is target faculty hiring or the search committees who are actually doing the recruitment, in order to ensure that all candidates who apply are being evaluated in an equitable fashion,” Wilton said.

Often, he explained, faculty hiring practices involve prioritizing the applicant’s academic trajectory and what institution they received their degrees from.

It’s not a bad way to ensure the quality of an applicant for a STEM teaching position, but the practice also perpetuates biases that tend to restrict the diversity of faculty, many of whom are given heavier teaching loads and teach large, introductory STEM courses with a rapidly diversifying undergraduate population.

“We do know that faculty hiring tends to favor those who go to the most prestigious institutions,” Wilton said. “So this is a way to ensure that there’s diversity in the teaching faculty line, and that there’s some representation for these students.”

To accomplish their objectives, the principal investigators on this project — Wilton, Stanley Lo from UC San Diego (who leads this project), Brian Sato and Natascha Buswell from UC Irvine, and Alegra Eroy-Reveles from UC Santa Cruz — have been working with faculty from their respective campuses who have been part of search committees for teaching (as opposed to research) professor applicants to build a more holistic rubric for candidate evaluations.

The rubric emphasizes not just the candidate’s teaching capabilities, but also what they individually bring to the position.

After developing and designing these standards with an initial cohort of professors, they have recruited a second group, all of whom are currently participating in candidate searches, to optimize these parameters.

“What kind of value are these rubrics bringing? Are they helping to change the dynamics of these search committees? Are they promoting different types of evaluation in the candidates they’re receiving?” Wilton said.

Over the course of this five-year project, the investigators plan to move from the current recruitment and hiring phase to the teaching phase, collecting feedback and refining the process at each step.

The end product will be a flexible and widely applicable model that can be used to bolster the diversity of STEM teaching faculty at four-year institutions across the country.

“The ultimate goal here is to have more equitable early-career faculty hires, regardless of whether or not the institution is an HSI,” Wilton said.