As University President Dave Frohnmayer delivered distinguished teaching awards Wednesday afternoon, the Oregon Students of Color Coalition gave out its own honors: the Zero Awards.
Zero Awards are granted to departments that have no tenure-track faculty of color. The last Zero Award ceremony was held in 2001.
Sophomore Jael Anker-Lagos, co-chair of OSCC, said the recipients haven’t changed much.
“The Zero Awards is to raise awareness … that even after five years, there’s still a lack of faculty of color on campus,” she said.
Five departments were given the award: the geological sciences, geography, political science, theatre arts, and planning, public policy and management departments.
OSCC gave the awards based on data it collected and from nominations by faculty and students within the departments.
Roughly 70 people gathered at the EMU Amphitheater to see the award presentations.
Erin O’Brien, interim director of the ASUO Women’s Center, called the state of faculty diversity “embarrassing.”
“This is a moment to really challenge the University to look at how many faculty of color we have,” she said.
Anker-Lagos said she delivered invitations to all departments that received awards, but no department representatives were present to accept the awards.
Professor Dana Johnston, head of the Geography Department, said he had not heard of the award before the Emerald contacted him.
“Is it meant to be an honor, or is it shameful?” he said. “The award serves the purpose of bringing back to the front burner the distribution of faculty in our department among different ethnic groups.”
Jeffrey Mason, head of the Theatre Arts Department, said he only recently heard that his department was an award recipient and could not attend because he had to teach a class.
Mason said he “agreed that the University should be trying to hire more faculty of color.”
He added that in past faculty searches within his department, efforts to recruit faculty of color have been unsuccessful because there has been a lack of applicants of color.
“The department did advertise … especially to reach African-American faculty,” he said. “But the fact is, in the past three searches we conducted, only 4 percent of applicants have identified as people of color.”
Associate professor Gerald Berk, head of the Political Science Department, said past attempts to recruit faculty of color have failed because the University couldn’t match offers from other universities.
“We’ve had no success, but we’ve been recruiting like crazy,” he said.
Just this year, Berk said, the department attempted to recruit a black political scientist from the University of California, Los Angeles.
“He had counter offers from University of Washington and UCLA, and the salary was over a third more than we could offer him,” he said.
After OSCC presented the awards, rally participants brought out 36 chairs that remained empty, except for a single student who sat in the middle. The exhibition was meant to display the isolation students of color feel in classes where the vast majority of the students are white.
Greg Vincent, vice provost of institutional equity and diversity, was present at the rally and said difficulties in recruiting faculty of color arise from funding constraints.
“I have found that many department chairs want to (recruit faculty of color), but there are issues with funding,” he said.

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