California State University, Los Angeles
PA-7: Support for Future Faculty Diversity

The University pursues a number of steps with the aim of recruiting strong and diverse applicant pools for faculty positions. These include the following:
Recruitment and Advertisement: Developing the Pool

- Require search committees to observe a recruitment timeline to ensure timely completion of recruitments and availability of the largest number of highly qualified applicants.

- Advertise faculty employment opportunities in a wide range of publications, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Diverse Jobs, CalJobs, HigherEdJobs, and discipline-specific sites.

- Provide additional funding for recruitment of a broad, diverse applicant pool.

- Require college deans to approve applicant pools before search committees begin evaluating applicants. Search Committees whose recruitment activities have not generated pools that are large or diverse or lack enough highly qualified applicants should work with Academic Personnel to ensure that they advertised and recruited as widely as possible. If they have not, they will be asked to augment their recruitment activities and expand the recruitment deadline.

- Provide unconscious bias awareness and diversity education for chairs and deans.

Position Announcements: Reflecting our values

- Include wording in Position Announcements stating that the university is a federally recognized Hispanic-serving and Minority-serving institution.

- Included wording in Position Announcements stating that faculty may have the opportunity to establish affiliate status with other academic programs, including ethnic/area studies.

- Included wording in Position Announcement stating that the successful candidate will be expected to join faculty, staff, students, and administrators in our University’s shared commitment to the principles of engagement, service, and the public good.

Search Committees:

- Provide search committees with information on the University’s Affirmative Action Plan for Recruiting Women and Minorities, and on the importance of attracting large, diverse, and highly qualified applicant pools.

- Implement a consistent and transparent way to review the number and diversity of applicants to assess effectiveness of the affirmative action plan to recruit minorities and women.

- Discuss a holistic approach to evaluating candidates that allows room to use multiple metrics and requires consideration of all hiring criteria, not allowing one or two measurements to dominate.

- Incorporate unconscious bias awareness and the value of diversity into search committee workshops.

- AVP for Research and Academic Personnel provides search committees with information on which programs nationally produce high numbers of ethnically and racially diverse doctoral students, so that these programs may be sent information on faculty employment opportunities (see http://diverseeducation.com/top100/GraduateDegreeProducers2014.php).

- Require search committees to advertise broadly to attract large, diverse, highly qualified applicant pools.

- Include as part of minimal criteria for all positions the requirement that candidates demonstrate an ability and/or interest in working in a multiethnic, multicultural environment.

- Require search committees to consider and address this criterion at all phases of the application evaluation process, including documentation in the Recruitment Analysis Report.

Interviews

- Require interview questions for both telephone/skype and on-campus interviews that assess the applicant’s ability and/or interest in working in a multiethnic, multicultural environment.

- Require approval by deans of the lists of candidates to be included in telephone/skype interviews and on-campus interviews.

General

- Require review by the Provost of the Recruitment Analysis Report (confirming sufficiency of the applicant pool and that all hiring criteria have been addressed) and curricula vitae of all finalists before approving the hire.