UB's commitment to women's equity and diversity fell short of expectations during a recent evaluation by a school-sponsored commission, and faculty and staff are not happy about the poor results.
At Tuesday's Faculty Senate Meeting, university faculty spoke about the Commission on Academic Excellence and Equity's finding that UB lacks appropriate gender equity. The commission was established after the Ad Hoc Task Force on Gender Equity in Promotions recommended in 2009 that UB exercise greater fairness in the hiring, promotion, and tenure of women. The group is made up of scholars and teachers at UB.
Professor Athena Mutua, chair of the Commission, said the group was charged in 2009 with making decisions about how the university community can support the culture of academic excellence and sustain scholarly accomplishments.
"We tried to identify what we call the best practices, with a focus on AAU institutions, and then we looked at reports issued by other universities," Mutua said during the meeting. "We also looked at a lot of association reports, so associations with subjects like political science, law, and physics. Those help us identify best practices."
The commission set out to work on issues like tenure review, recruitment, advancement, mentoring, and work-life balance support for UB's female staff.
The report noted that UB is not nearly as diverse as it should be, nor as diverse as it should become to remain competitive as a university in the future. Prestigious female faculty will not come to UB if it has a reputation for not promoting and granting tenure to women.
The 2009 task force also found that UB falls below the standard it set concerning diversity and equity.
"Thus our faculty needs to be, in a word, diverse - diverse in perspective, intellect, and culture...[UB] must then ensure that its norms, structures, and systems are fair, and that these facilitate, as opposed to hinder, the success of all faculty, students, and staff despite their differences and across their diversity: It must ensure equity across diversity," the commission's report reads.
Those at the meeting discussed briefly the entire report and the commission's findings. The Senate voted on discussing the report in more detail at the next meeting. Mary Bisson, chair of the recruitment committee, agreed with the decision.
"It's a very substantial report, and I have to agree with the Senate, that they really didn't have time to deal with any substantive issues," Bisson said. "There's going to need to be a lot more discussion about [the report], and I hope we get the time to do that."
The commission's goal is to spread the report to as many faculty members as possible, so that change will happen among the university. Mutua ultimately wants to see equal treatment among all people at UB.
"When we're talking about equity across diversity, were talking about fairness across diversity," Mutua said. "We're pushing for excellence, not just average."
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Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
