Five percent of University employees are Asian or Pacific Islander, 3 percent are Hispanic, 1 percent is black and 1 percent is American Indian. The vast majority, 86 percent, is white.
“I look at the numbers, and they’re troubling,” said ASUO Women’s Center Interim Director Erin O’Brien, who is Asian-American. “But it feels even more isolating when you’re actually living in it.”
Faculty and staff of color have struggled to find their place at the University. Although their numbers have risen in the past few years, some say it hasn’t gotten much easier.
“It’s pretty bleak, despite what the administration often says,” Ethnic Studies Director Martin Summers, also an associate professor of history, said of the situation on campus. “Numbers have increased, but it’s not very apparent as far as moving around campus.”
The University is struggling to attract and hold onto these faculty members. It has taken the first steps in revamping efforts to recruit and retain faculty of color with the proposed Diversity Action Plan, a comprehensive set of policies, initiatives and action items intended to address issues of diversity in faculty, among other things.
Greg Vincent, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, was hired in January 2004 to address issues of diversity and equity on campus and was charged with the task of developing the plan. The five-year plan
is currently in development, and Vincent said the first set of policy recommendations will be done by the beginning of spring term and will be ready for implementation the
following term.
“One of the University’s goals is to build a critical mass of people from diverse backgrounds through active recruitment and retention of students and faculty,” Vincent told the Emerald in December. “You only get the benefits of diversity if you have enough numbers to break down isolation and stereotypes.”
Recruitment and retention
A main challenge the University faces in building “critical mass” is the low retention rate of faculty of color, something Lyllye Parker, an academic adviser in the Office of Multicultural Affairs, referred to as the “revolving door.”
“Faculty of color are being hired, staying for one to two years, then moving on,” Parker said.
Retention rates have long been central to the discussion surrounding diversity in faculty. In 2001, Kenneth Lehrman III, then the director of the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal
Opportunity, said retention of minority employees was disproportionate; employees of color were leaving at greater rates than their white peers.
“Although minority faculty have been
successful, the overall retention of minority employees remains troublesome,” Lehrman wrote in a report to University President Dave Frohnmayer.

That same year, the Office of Academic Affairs initiated exit interviews of faculty of color who had left the University between 1996 and 2000, in part to address these concerns. The final report contained responses from 12 faculty of color, although 36 faculty members had left during that period.
The report summarized the respondents’ answers to a number of questions regarding their experiences at the University and their reasons for leaving. While many respondents cited reasons that were not related to diversity, some indicated clear frustration with the University’s handling of diversity issues.
“Colleagues/department were paternalistic on issues of diversity,” the report stated.
“I felt wounded and hopeless when I left. Felt my hire was classic tokenism,” read another paraphrased quote.
One respondent said “some faculty attitudes were that a faculty of color person was inferior.”
Lorraine Davis, vice president for academic affairs, said no discernible pattern for
leaving could be found among the
respondents’ answers.
The University’s history has been marred with the departures of prominent faculty
of color.
In 1985, the University School of Law lost its dean and one of its most prestigious scholars, Derrick Bell. Bell, who is black, resigned after the law school faculty committee refused to extend a professorship to an Asian-American woman.
After the committee had conducted interviews, it selected its top three candidates. When the first two candidates, both white males, refused the offer, the committee decided to restart the search rather than hire the woman.
“I felt a conflict between my responsibilities as a dean and my beliefs in how hiring should be done,” Bell told the Emerald in 1985. “I was faced with having to reject a person I thought was very well-qualified on the basis of a procedure I couldn’t go along with.”
Two years ago, professor Robin Morris Collin also left the School of Law for Willamette University. There was nothing ambivalent about her reasons for leaving — Collin said in a Feb. 20 Register-Guard article that racial attitudes eventually led to
her departure.
“There were no other reasons,” Collin said in the story. “I would have stayed.”
In one instance, the University faced legal action. Former University employee Joe Wade filed a lawsuit in June 2001 alleging racial discrimination.
Wade was the director of the Office of Academic Advising and Student Services when, in 1999, the University decided not to renew his contract.
The suit was settled out of court in 2002, with the settlement stipulating the creation of “the position of Vice Provost for Institutional Diversity … for a minimum of five years.”
University Senior Vice President and Provost John Moseley said the University had already planned to create the position, and the stipulation was merely proof that the University would follow through with its plan.
“(Wade) wanted assurance that we were going to do that,” Moseley said in an interview last spring. “And we intended to do that.”
In January 2004, Vincent, formerly the vice provost of Louisiana State University, was hired to fill the position of vice provost of institutional equity and diversity.
A hidden problem
During the course of the Emerald’s investigation, some current faculty members expressed discomfort and fear of speaking about diversity issues.
Collin, a former faculty member, said she feared telling her story to the media because of a “continuing threat of retaliation.”
“I believe that members of the UO faculty have used their contacts to retaliate against us within the legal community of Oregon and the larger community of legal academia,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I believe they have repeatedly used these contacts to deride us personally, and discredit our records of achievement.”
Affirmative Action Director Penny Daugherty said to the best of
her knowledge, no such retaliation had occurred.

“Can I sit here and say that retaliation never occurred? I can’t say that,” she said. “I can tell you that this institution takes the issue of retaliation very seriously, and they follow up.”
Davis said she didn’t know where such a fear would come from.
“It saddens me and greatly concerns me,” she said. “I don’t have an answer for why it exists. … I’d like to believe that we’re open and willing to listen to people’s concerns.”
Past and present initiatives
The University has implemented several programs to address the issue of retention and recruitment.
In 1994, the University initiated the Underrepresented Minority Recruitment Plan. The plan signified a renewed effort to recruit minority faculty by providing monetary incentives to departments that hired faculty of color.
The plan established a recruitment fund, which rewarded departments that hired underrepresented minority faculty with funding totaling $90,000 for each person hired.
The money is distributed over three years. Since the program’s inception, almost $2.2 million has been allocated for recruitment efforts, according to a 2004 Oregon University System diversity report.
Ethnic
Studies Director Summers said funds can be used for program development, such as bringing in speakers. A third of the funds are given directly to the hired faculty member to use at his or her discretion for conferences. Some of the money is used to enhance the compensation packages offered to the candidates.
Summers said the fund helps address the additional responsibilities that faculty of color have placed on them, often by virtue of their ethnicity, by providing compensation.
“Faculty of color find themselves in situations that they have demands placed on them that their white peers do not have,” he said.
They are often asked to serve on committees, mentor students of color and serve as ambassadors to communities of color.
“Those demands do take a toll,” Summers said. “It takes away time that should be spent on doing the things you need to gain tenure. … (The fund) works as a compensation.”
The fund has had a hand in several recruitment success stories. The Robert D. Clark Honors College recently hired three faculty members of color, two of which fell into the “underrepresented” category. The college will receive two $90,000 budget increases as a result.
“I support the way it’s set up,” Clark Honors College Director Richard Kraus, a professor of political science, said of the fund. Kraus said some of the money will go toward the new professors’ research and the college’s new “Thinker in Residence” program.
Kraus added that he is happy with the way the new hires have performed and is excited to expand the college’s curriculum to include material beyond the Euro-American world view.
“We’re not just looking for people whose faces are different,” he said. “We want people with a different way of going about things.”
The Clark Honors College found the new faculty members by defining the open positions in a way that would attract minority candidates, Kraus said.
Dayo Mitchell, one of the recruits, said the money will help her do more research and allow her to travel to the eastern United States, where the most prominent research is being done in her field of the history of the Atlantic world.
“(The fund) is really a recruiting tool; it encourages the best people to come to Oregon,” Mitchell said.
The proposed Diversity Action Plan is also expected to contribute to better recruitment and retention. Summers, one of two point people for the plan’s critical mass work group, said the plan will address the isolation that faculty of color might feel by proposing cluster hires, which are group hires based on themes or on a particular expertise. The hires would be made across a number of departments.
“The goal is to bring in a group of people (in cluster hires) … so that they already feel like part of a community when they get here,” he said.
While improvements in recruiting have been made, some say more could be done.
“They’ve been better the past couple of years, but better than what?” Summers said, emphasizing the little minority hiring that had been done in the past. “Some departments still have a very long way to go.”
A community’s role
Academic adviser Parker partially attributes the low retention rates to feelings of isolation, which may stem from a lack of diversity in the community. According to the 2000 census, more than 90 percent of respondents in Lane County considered themselves white.
“We can attract the most brilliant faculty to this campus, but if you can’t connect them and find a way to anchor them, they’re not going to stay,” Parker said.
Some University faculty members and others in the community have said Eugene isn’t necessarily the most diversity-supportive city, a factor that might contribute to the University’s
diversity woes.
City Councilor David Kelly, a member of Eugene’s Human Rights Commission, said there is work to be done in the government and in the community.
“A number of people in the community have a blind spot,” Kelly said. “They don’t even realize that there are serious racial and ethnic intolerance in Eugene.”
“Racism is really entrenched in the infrastructure of our city,” Parker said.
People of color have trouble connecting with the community because they feel isolated, she added.
“There are no cultural centers,” Parker said. “The environment is not conducive to them feeling comfortable, feeling safe and feeling accepted.”
Kelly echoed Parker’s concerns about isolation.
“I think some individuals feel driven away, and some individuals feel prompted to leave because of neglect,” Kelly said. “They don’t connect with the community or feel that the community is connecting with them.”
Some said the community isn’t overtly hostile, but that sometimes it can be difficult to connect.
“People in Eugene are well-intentioned, but the daily interactions can get a little strange,” ASUO Women’s Center Interim Director O’Brien said. “People say these offensive things, and you just scratch your head.”
Assistant professor Mitchell, who has lived in Eugene for only a few months, said the city is supportive.
“There’s a lot of space for individualism in this town,” said Mitchell, who added that the city is far more diverse than the Vermont town in which she once lived. “I’ve been struck by how friendly people are in Eugene.”
But there is always room for improvement, Kelly said.

“The (Human Rights Commission) gave me a much greater awareness of how pervasive some of the negative racial attitudes are in the community, and also the great frustration of people who have been working on these issues for 10 or 20 years and don’t see signs of progress,” Kelly said. “All of us, myself included, need to work on changing our hearts and minds. What is ultimately going to make the biggest transformation in the community is for all of us to be more aware of the dynamics of racial issues, of the assumptions that each of us makes about our neighbors and our community.
“Eugene’s elected leadership could take a more active role around diversity issues,” he continued, adding that the City Council agreed to discuss race and racism more.
The first step in fixing the problem is admitting a problem exists,
Parker said.
“They don’t think it’s broke,” she said. “It’s broke. What we have to do is find a way to convince them that it’s broke.”
Nonetheless, the faculty of color on campus don’t have to be proportional to diversity in the community, Summers said.
“We hire from a national pool,” he said. “The number of minority in faculty shouldn’t reflect the local
demographics because we are a
national university.”
The need for diversity
Many faculty members said diversity in faculty is important, given the
increasingly diverse nature of
today’s workplace.

Charles Martinez, an associate professor of educational leadership and the College of Education’s director of diversity, said the rapidly changing demographics of Oregon’s schoolchildren have made it imperative that
tomorrow’s t
eachers have multicultural training.
The College of Education has renewed its efforts
to recruit more faculty who have expertise in multiculturalism.
“That changing context changes us all,” he said. “It’s our responsibility to prepare our students to do that kind of work.”
O’Brien said diversity in faculty
is integral to providing students with
a comprehensive education and
the tools they need to perform in
increasingly diverse work settings.
“The student population needs to know how to survive in a diverse society,” she said. “Believe me, if you leave Oregon, it’s going to be more diverse.”
Parker echoed the sentiment.
“This is a global society,” she said. “(The University) has to be representative. Through education, you get freedom; remember, with freedom comes responsibility. We haven’t taken on the responsibility of making sure that every corner, every alleyway, every little nook is representative.”
Looking to the future
Those working on integrating the Diversity Action Plan hope it will further the University’s mission to
increase diversity.
Vincent, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, said the preliminary set of recommendations will be completed by the beginning of spring term so that faculty, students and community members can comment on the policies.
Summers said he’s enthusiastic about the effectiveness of the plan.
“At the same time, I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said. “I’m not
quite sure there’s going to be the commitment of resources required to
implement the policies.”
Parker said she was similarly enthusiastic about the plan but warned that the University shouldn’t overestimate it.
“I think that they have just stepped up to the plate with the hiring of Dr. Vincent,” Parker said of the University administration. “Where they fall short is in thinking that one person can fix the problem.”
“I give the University credit,” she continued. “They’re addressing the problem. But we haven’t found the key yet that opens the door.”

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