A push in recruitment efforts to attract women and minority applicants to UC Davis gained ground this year with a significant increase in women and minorities among new ladder-rank faculty members. Approximately 60 percent of the 81 new tenure-track faculty hires are women and people of color.
Women account for 40.7 percent of these new hires, a 45 percent increase over 1999-2000 levels and a 70 percent increase from the previous three years when females represented approximately 24 percent of new tenure-track faculty members.
In all, of the 118 new Academic Senate and Cooperative Exten-sion members this year, approximately 40 percent are women. Aca-demic Senate hires in-clude faculty in the regular professorial series (tenure-track faculty), the Professor of Clinical Medicine series, and the Professor in Res-idence series.
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, who assumed her post in July, credits a more ef-fective recruiting process for bringing more women and faculty of color to the campus.
"The significant increase in female and faculty of color hires during this last year is an extremely positive advance for UC Davis. Now, we must ensure that these individuals have every opportunity to succeed in building their careers here," Hinshaw says. "Recruiting more effectively is part of our objective, but providing a supportive environment that helps them to be highly successful at UC Davis is another critical responsibility we all share."
A faculty recruitment task force assembled two years ago by Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef and former Provost Robert Grey examined new ways to attract women and applicants of color. Clearly, those efforts have been successful, says Vice Provost for Academic Personnel Barbara Horwitz.
"The individuals that we've hired as a group present a much greater diversity than we've had in recent years, and I think that reflects, to a great extent, the efforts that the search committees and deans have gone to in order to ensure that the pool of applicants is more diverse," she says. "Our new junior faculty hires are individuals with excellent credentials and potential while our senior hires have already demonstrated that their scholarship is outstanding."
Horwitz points out that the campus task force initiated a significant number of recommendations to ensure more diversity in the applicants including issues like cluster hiring, being more proactive in calling potential applicants, and better advertising at professional scientific meetings to increase the visibility of the openings. Although it's hard to pinpoint exactly why this year's recruitment was so successful in attracting a more diverse pool of applicants, she says the collective effort on all fronts is now paying dividends.
A number of academic initiatives created over the past several years - Arts Vision, Computational Sciences, Genetics and Development, Genomics, Hemispheric Institute of the Americas, Mind Sciences, NEAT (Nanophases in the Environment, Agriculture and Technology), and Quantitative Social Sciences - are also beginning to bear fruit by allowing faculty from different units greater opportunity to interact.
Although recruitment to fill these new positions is still gearing up, Horwitz anticipates these initiatives, which provide new research emphasis but are built on existing strengths at UC Davis, will continue to be a focus for hiring in the near future.
"I've talked with a number of new faculty members and many are attracted to this campus because the walls between our units are thin," Horwitz says. "There is so much opportunity to interact with faculty from different units, for collaboration, for interdisciplinary types of work that you don't see in many other places - the whole is much bigger than the sum of the parts in terms of interaction."
For Daniel Kliebenstein, assistant professor and assistant plant geneticist for vegetable crops, being able to interact with colleagues in different fields on the same campus was a crucial consideration for choosing UC Davis.
"I've always attempted to undertake research that addresses a specific question through the use of a very broad set of experimental approaches," he says. "The diversity in the general academic community here enables me to identify an expert on campus for any technique that I may need aid with in progressing my research. This is a great help to a junior faculty member and was a major reason for coming to Davis."
Successful recruiting involves more than just selling the merits of a department to a prospective faculty member, Horwitz says. First impressions of the campus can also have a big impact.
"What kind of an impression they get of UC Davis as a whole, the intellectual climate, the environment in the program they would be joining - all these are critical to getting the individuals that we want," she says. "How the candidate feels during a visit here as part of the recruiting process is very important."
A graduate of the UC system, Raul Aranovich, assistant professor of linguistics, says he has always been impressed with its dedication to research and serious scholarly work in the campus community. After four years of teaching at the University of Texas, he says he needed a more stimulating environment.
"At Davis, I was attracted to the department's approach to language studies, which closely matched my own interests. The plans for future growth, especially in the direction of the application of linguistics, was another positive factor," Aranovich says. "Besides, I found an intellectual atmosphere here that I didn't find in Texas."
While intellectual stimulation is certainly a top priority for new faculty members, many of them have personal concerns as well, such as locating another job for a significant other or concerns about where to raise children. Through POP, or Partner Opportunities Program, UC Davis assists life partners in finding either an academic appointment or job opening in the community. The program, now in its fifth year, was a key factor in assuring Robin Hill and her husband, Tom Bills, that Davis was the place for them - despite the fact she will always consider New York home.
"Our friends found it unfathomable that we could ever leave New York," says Hill, an assistant professor of art and art history. "We were never looking to leave, but accepting a position at Davis evolved into a wonderful opportunity we couldn't pass up."
With two small children and two busy professional careers as artists, the couple also taught classes to make ends meet. Juggling all these demands left little time to arrange time off simultaneously, Hill says. Although they both love the hustle and bustle of New York, Hill says the rewards of relocating to a house and studio amid the farmlands of Woodland are tremendous.
"Now we're able to synchronize our time off, we've gained the huge resource of time together. The only way we could do it though was if we both had secure positions," she says.
Trina Wood is a freelance writer whose work appears periodically in Dateline.