Dear Editors:
I read the front-page article “UB’s Black Faculty: Dwindling and Isolated,” with great interest, as I am a black faculty member at UB myself. And as a senior administrator charged with ensuring UB’s diversity, I thought the article was fair and balanced. Ironically, it was published the day before the Chronicle of Higher Education released a list of AAU member universities with the greatest diversity among tenure-track hires in the Fall of 2015. UB is listed at #33 of 60 universities, above Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, UC-Berkeley, and Stony Brook University. I have attached the list, and hope you will publish it. It provides context for better understanding how UB is faring amongst its AAU peers in hiring underrepresented minority faculty members. UB is by no means at the bottom of the heap.
Our commitment to faculty diversity is evident in the training of search committees on reducing barriers to diversity in the hiring of deans and faculty members; the investment in staffing an Office of Inclusive Excellence responsible for continuously assessing UB’s progress toward inclusive excellence; our faculty mentoring initiative for women and underrepresented minority faculty; and UB’s new strategic diversity and inclusion plan. As Ashley Inkumsah’s article acknowleges, the challenges are very real. But our resolve to achieve even better outcomes in relation to our peers is just as real.
Sincerely,
Teresa A. Miller
Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion
Professor of Law
University at Buffalo
