Initiative seeks to increase diversity
It has incentives for departments that hire under-represented minorities.
April 6, 2007
Putting efforts such as faculty-hiring incentives and the Difficult Dialogues program to work, the Chancellor's Diversity Initiative strives to make diversity at MU more accurately reflect the working world.
The Chancellor's Diversity Initiative is a consulting office that collaborates with faculty, staff and students "to recruit, retain and enhance their ability," Chancellor's Diversity Initiative Coordinator Noor Azizan-Gardner said.
The limited number of minorities at MU has become an Achilles' heel to student life, according to Gardner.
Gardner said because of the small minority population at MU, students go through their lives on campus without talking to someone who's a minority.
"Students don't have to engage with anybody because the minorities are so small they choose not to," she said.
Therefore, the Chancellor's Diversity Initiative has begun efforts to support diversity among students and faculty members.
Deputy Chancellor Michael Middleton said the office uses faculty-hiring incentives to improve diversity at MU.
The hiring incentives include rewarding departments that hire underrepresented minorities with half of the faculty member's base pay.
Other efforts for improvement include promoting conversation between faculty and students in various workshops, including Difficult Dialogues.
Difficult Dialogues advises faculty members about how to approach controversial topics including religion and race in class, Gardner said.
But with declining state support, the budget is split between faculty-hiring incentives and improving student diversity, which, according to Middleton, poses a problem.
"It's hard to prioritize where money will be spent with students and enrollment or faculty and hiring incentives," Middleton said.
This is one of many challenges with increasing diversity.
"This is not the kind of field where you see giant numbers overnight," MU equity director Noel English said. "There's a lot of groundwork that has to be laid. There really is a legitimate commitment."
Gardner said with a history rooted in cultural injustice, it's not an easy task.
"We need to get students to go to college and then to go on and get their advanced degrees," Gardner said.
Gardner said socioeconomic status also adds to the reasoning for why diversity has been a systematic problem in post-secondary education.
"The poor is getting poorer, the rich is getting richer — as a result we are leaving many students in the lowest economic stratum behind," Gardner said. "The U.S. is getting more and more diverse even by the second, and yet access to higher education is still available only to a few."
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