The University of Oregon will pursue four new initiatives to support racial equity, Provost Patrick Phillips announced in an email sent to the UO community this morning.
The message included specific actions that the university plans on pursuing “immediately,” and spelled out its plans for doing so.
The first of these points is a “five-year initiative to establish a research and policy center focused on racial disparities and resilience.” Over that time, UO plans to add “12 new faculty lines” with an emphasis on racial disparities in health, education, housing, unemployment and wealth and to invest upwards of $11 million in the project.
It will also create up to six new faculty positions in “departments with historically underrepresented faculty.” Although the university will not hammer out the specifics of this plan until the beginning of winter term, Phillips expressed his goal to “expand our scope of educational offerings and scholarly contributions,” as well as forming a center “whose members are focused on making a difference in the world at large.”
Secondly, Phillips pointed to the Black Studies and Latinx Studies minors, both of which the university launched ahead of the 2020-2021 academic year. He explained that the faculty in the Black Studies minor will fill many of the faculty openings described under the first initiative.
Additionally, the UO board of trustees has developed a new program “to analyze and develop an action plan to address the ongoing opportunity gap for Black students and other students of color” in alignment with the University Senate’s anti-racism work.
As a third point, Phillips expressed his intention to work with UO administration “to increase the diversity of our staff as well as our faculty,” and to make equity and inclusion “integral to everything we do.” This will include tracking the racial diversity of UO’s staff.
“We know that no new hiring initiatives will be successful without addressing long-standing issues at the university, as well as within the Eugene/Springfield community, that have served as barriers to the success and retention of diverse faculty,” Phillips wrote.
To address this, UO will hire a third-party consultant to anonymously speak with BIPOC staff, draw an accurate picture of their experiences — especially the experiences of Black faculty members — at UO and “immediately identify strategies to address those challenges.”
Phillips said he believed these conversations will reveal more steps the university needs to take to combat racism, actions that he hopes to take on decisively.
“A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by itself is not sufficient,” he wrote. “The times demand that we find our way forward to become actively anti-racist, to move beyond the comfort of regular institutional processes geared toward addressing diversity issues and, in particular, to no longer tolerate a glacial pace of progress. This is my ongoing commitment and promise to the UO community, and especially to our students.”
