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Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University in New York, has announced a major new commitment to increase the diversity of the university’s faculty. Over the next five years, Columbia University will invest $100 million in the effort to support recruitment and career development for professors, doctoral, and postdoctoral students who have traditionally been underrepresented in higher education.
The new program comes on the heels of $85 million invested in similar initiatives since 2005. Some of the funds will be earmarked for faculty retention programs. Additional funding will provide for the recruitment of dual-career couple and for mid-career research grants.
President Bollinger stated that “the aim is to develop new leaders and expand scholarship, initiatives and programming to meet the needs of the University. This is a longstanding initiative inseparable from Columbia’s identity and core values.” Dennis Mitchell, vice provost for faculty diversity and inclusion at Columbia University, added that “diversity changes the climate and the culture of the university. We can’t have excellence without diversity, and the belief that they are separate things is a fallacy.”
Source: Columbia University to Invest $100 Million in Faculty Diversity Programs : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
Posts tagged as “faculty diversity”
The University of Cincinnati has announced a $40 million commitment to diversify its faculty. The initiative includes a cluster hiring program where a group of scholars in a particular field are hired to boost the university’s academic standing in that discipline. Another facet of the faculty diversity plan is an effort to find jobs for the spouses of potential faculty hires.
The Strategic Hiring Opportunity Program actually began in 2013 and to date 26 faculty members from underrepresented minority groups have been hired. Recently, the provost’s office allocated a new $4 million fund to hire a cluster of faculty members in urban studies. Funds will be provided for each of the six new faculty members in this cluster for a graduate fellow and an undergraduate research assistant.
A group called Black UC recently held a rally on the University of Cincinnati. The group said that efforts to diversify the faculty have gone too slow. The group stated that there were 75 Blacks out of a total of 2,800 faculty members on campus.
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Yale University has announced a five-year, $50 million program aimed at increasing the diversity of its faculty. The university will earmark $25 million over a five-year period for faculty recruitment, faculty appointments, and emerging faculty development. Participating schools will match these funds, earmarking a total of $50 million for the effort. In addition, the university will undertake faculty development programs and will expand programs aimed at increasing the number of minority scholars in the pipeline for faculty posts.
In a letter to the campus community, Yale President Peter Salovey and Provost Ben Polak, stated that “Yale’s education and research missions are propelled forward by a faculty that stands at the forefront of scholarship, research, practice, mentoring, and teaching. An excellent faculty in all of these dimensions is a diverse faculty, and that diversity must reach across the whole of Yale — to every school and to every department.”
The two university leaders added that they “are committed to investing the significant funding and human capital that will be necessary to make this initiative a success.” But they noted that “increasing the excellence and diversity of our faculty will take more than resources; it will require the dedication and efforts of colleagues from across the university. You, the faculty of today, are our crucial partners in shaping the faculty of tomorrow. We look forward to working with you toward this important goal.”
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