A presidential task force’s yearlong; systemwide assessment of the University of California’s efforts to strengthen diversity in faculty recruitment and retention may be summarized as a call for campuses “to do more.”

Titled “The Representation of Minorities Among Ladder Rank Faculty,” the report <www.universityofcalifornia.edu/diversity> says that despite an increasingly diverse national pool of doctoral candidates, “the diversity of the UC faculty has remained flat.” Additionally, the number of “underrepresented minority faculty on each campus are so low that these faculty report experiences of isolation and marginalization in their academic life.”

Recognizing that diversity has many aspects, the report says it focused on data regarding ethnic/racial minorities and gender in order to “promote a new culture of inclusion, opportunity, and tolerance at the University of California that will benefit all members of the academic community.”

The report warns: “The status of faculty diversity at the University of California today is critical to the future” of the University. That warning was seconded in a cover statement signed by UC President Robert C. Dynes and the chancellors of all 10 campuses. Each campus will provide follow-up reports next year.

Looking at the report’s aggregate numbers, tenured UC African American faculty, for example, have barely budged from the 1990 level of 2 percent to the 2.5 percent reported in 2004 and 2005. Chicanos and Latinos fare little better, with their numbers ranging from 3.7 percent in 1990 to 5 percent of total UC faculty in 2005. American Indian faculty numbers have changed very little—from 0.3 percent in 1990 to 0.4 percent by 2000.

Though most of the UC faculty ethnic group charts “look pretty bad because they are so flat,” says Maria Herrera-Sobek, UCSB’s associate vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and academic policy, she finds encouragement in the upswing among UC women faculty. This UC group grew from 17.1 percent in 1990 to 27.3 percent in 2005.

Herrera-Sobek, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies, was UCSB’s sole representative on the UC task force that produced the faculty diversity overview.

When UC’s aggregate numbers were broken out by campus, UCSB’s total of 8.7 percent of underrepresented minority faculty tied with UCLA’s for third-best percentage among the nine undergraduate campuses. “I think one of the reason’s UCSB did so well (in the campus comparison) is because we have the ethnic studies programs,” she observes.

Under Chancellor Henry Yang, UCSB has aggressively pursued faculty diversity in its recruiting, according to Executive Vice Chancellor Gene Lucas. One example is that this campus has hired 10 minority faculty members over a 40-month period from the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program. “This is 25 percent of the total program fellows hired in the UC system (during that time),” Lucas said.

The report’s analysis of disciplines underscores the obstacles facing UC diversity efforts. Underrepresented minority faculty are concentrated, it says, in the arts, humanities, and social sciences: “There are very few in engineering and computer sciences, physical sciences, and life sciences.” Women faculty members follow the same pattern.

Compounding the problem, the report notes, is that resignation rates for every minority group exceed that of whites. African American faculty resign at a rate almost twice that of white faculty. Herrera-Sobek notes that other universities also poach from UC.