Hiring goals fall short

Last summer's decision by the UC Board of Regents to remove considerations of race from its admissions policies ignited angry protests and harsh debate over affirmative action in California's universities.

California State University schools -- including SF State -- have stayed out of the fray, keeping their affirmative action policies in place. But how these policies work, and what their goals and accomplishments have been, will undoubtedly become part of the debate if and when those policies come under fire.

For now SF State and other CSU schools can accept all students who meet the minimum eligibility requirements, and are spared making any decisions about race-based admissions.

"We don't use race for admissions, because we don't have to make selections," said Ed Apodaca, associate vice president for enrollment services.

While affirmative action is not a factor in admissions, eligibility requirements have been relaxed for economically disadvantaged students under the university's Educational Opportunity Program.

"EOP is an effort to increase the under-representation of students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. That includes minorities as well as non-minorities. That includes men as well as women. These programs are not based exclusively on race, ethnicity or gender," Torres said.

In addition, EOP's Student Affirmative Action Program is designed to "increase the eligibility rate of students who have been historically under-represented in higher education," through outreach services that help high school students develop academic skills, according to SF State's 1995-96 Student Bulletin.

Even without affirmative action, minority enrollment in the CSU system has increased dramatically over the past 10 years, to reflect the growing number of minorities in California. In 1985, minorities represented 30 percent of student enrollment. By 1994, that percentage had jumped to 47 percent, with Filipinos and Hispanics making the greatest gains.

But Apodaca predicts that in about four years, SF State will be forced to start making some tough decisions.

"The data shows that within the next ten years, we will have 399,000 more students than we (have now). The Cal State system will have to decide which students they serve," he said.

Hiring goals

At the moment, the heart of affirmative action at SF State lies in its hiring practices-- especially of faculty.

Most minorities in universities are in staff positions, said Joe Torres, director of affirmative action.

"The most difficult area of affirmative action hiring at the university level is within the faculty," Torres said.

As a short-term goal, the diversity of the university's faculty ideally would correspond with the number of minority and female Ph.D. recipients nationwide.

Of tenured and tenure-track faculty at SF State, 24.4 percent were members of minority groups in the fall of 1994. That number compares favorably to the percentage of doctorates awarded to minorities in 1992, which was 10.4 percent, according to the National Research Council.

But Professor David Shipp of the School of Social Work said that number doesn't mean much.

"It's a very misleading, a very spurious statistic because it really does not reflect the individual racial groups. Any time you aggregate data lumping all people of color together, I believe you do them a real serious disservice," he said.

Between 1982 and 1992, for example, the number of doctorates awarded to minorities increased by 27 percent. But the number of doctorates awarded to African Americans actually declined 9 percent, falling from the 1,047 awarded in 1982 to 951 in 1992.

And while women received 44.1 percent of the nearly 26,000 doctorates awarded in 1992, they held only 35.5 percent of the tenured and tenure-track faculty positions at SF State in the fall of 1994.

Looking at the total number of minority faculty members and at individual groups (see graph), it is clear that SF State's long-term goal -- for the university's faculty to reflect the diversity of students enrolled here -- is a long way off.

Torres concedes that such a goal is difficult, but said that if any institution can do it, SF State can.

"SF State has attracted large numbers of minorities and women for faculty positions. San Francisco is a very attractive, livable community," Torres said. "Even though there may be only a few minority Ph.D.s in a given field, nationally speaking we are still able to attract more than our fair share because of who we are as an institution and where we are located."

According to Torres, departments are required to engage in a vigorous effort to reach out and contact candidates from under-represented groups so they are aware of available positions.

"Often departments will be insensitive to the fact that there are qualified minority candidates out there that have to be accessed in different ways," Torres said. "They're not to rely on their same traditional networks of friends and colleagues to gain referrals for applications. In other words, business as usual is not acceptable. The old boys network is not acceptable."

While CSU's affirmative action policies are to "promote employment opportunities" for women, members of minority groups, people with disabilities and veterans, SF State has its own, more explicit policy.

Affirmative action policies at SF State require that in selecting equally qualified candidates for a position where there is an under-utilization of ethnic minorities and women, the affirmative action candidate must be chosen.

To make sure departments comply with the university's policy, Torres reviews the departments' search plan.

"Often your under-represented applicants are coming from outside the university, and you need to make every assurance that the system you create for reviewing and selecting applicants is absolutely equitable ... not only in terms of who your search committee members are, but the interview questions you develop," Torres said.

Beverly Ovrebo, chair of the department of health education, said the affirmative action office was instrumental in a faculty search conducted last year which led to the hiring of an African American woman.

"The office not only helps us practically, but it also provides leadership. It continues to say to the department, to the faculty, this is the highest value. Without that office, it would be very easy to fall back and to say 'we'll just put an ad in the paper,'" she said.

Torres said although most departments welcome his help, some are hesitant.

"Faculty are very independent. They like to do their own thing. They feel they have been doing it for many, many years and they feel they don't need advice from people from outside their department," Torres said.

Another reason for a department's lack of diversity in the applicant pool, Torres said, boils down to money.

"Unfortunately, the search committees have limited funds to advertise for positions. Sometimes they can only put an ad in one publication, and not in all these minority publications that exist," he said. "Often departments neither have the time nor the expertise to be able to find out where potentially qualified minority female or disabled candidates are located in their particular discipline."

When a candidate is selected, Torres then takes another look at the applicants who were not selected in order to determine whether the candidate being recommended is truly the best qualified among the entire pool of applicants.

"Good-faith" efforts or else

If departments fail to take "good faith actions" to reach both short and long-range affirmative action goals, the university can impose sanctions, according to the SF State Faculty Manual.

"Failure by schools, divisions and departments to make satisfactory progress will result in review and action by the Vice President for Academic Affairs, including restriction of faculty positions and other budgetary allocations," the manual states.

"Rather than sanctions," Torres said, "there has been a recognition that in some cases where a department has done particularly well in generating significant numbers of well-qualified affirmative action candidates, the institution has given them more than one position.

"I would rather work on some kind of incentive, or at least on a relationship that could be developed between this office and the department. I think sanctions are the last resort," Torres said.

Professor Gerald Fisher, chair of the physics and astronomy department, said pressure of that kind has never been applied to his department.

"I know of departments that have gotten the two positions, but I have never heard of a department being sanctioned," Fisher said.

His department has no minority tenured or tenure-track faculty members, and because of budget constraints, changing that situation will be difficult, Fisher said.

"We have not had a faculty position (open) in 10 years. It is very hard to diversify when you are denied the opportunity to recruit," he said. The department has a faculty opening for next year.

Torres agreed that the main reason for delays in diversification is that positions are not opening up.

"There has been a steady decrease in the number of faculty openings, with a decline in funding for public education. You're finding more people retiring and less positions being filled, and you're taking a longer time to diversify the faculty," he said.

Professor Donald Provence, chair of the philosophy department, said his last faculty hire was seven years ago. The department currently has no minority faculty members.

"There just simply are not very many people available within our profession. Minorities are in high demand in our profession -- they don't have any trouble getting jobs once they've got a Ph.D. in philosophy," he said.

Not that Provence doesn't make recruiting minorities a high priority.

"We view it actually as a disadvantage in our program," he said. "When you look at us, we look really white. We don't think that's particularly attractive to our student body."

But it would be difficult for the university to justify sanctions, he said.

"They would have to ask whether we are under-utilizing people who are in our available pool, and the answer to that, unfortunately, in the case of persons of color, is no," Provence said.

In contrast to Torres' assertion that San Francisco is an attractive place for prospective minority candidates, Provence said other schools may have more to offer.

"We're always going to be in a competitive situation to get the people who are there, and I must tell you we're not the most attractive institution in the world necessarily. When you look at pay and workload, (candidates) very often decide that there's someplace else that they'd prefer to be," he said.

That is exactly what happened with Thandeka, the department's last minority faculty member. Thandeka, an African American woman who uses only one name, left SF State for Williams College in Massachusetts.

"We were unable to keep her because of the competitive situation," he said of Thandeka.

To retain minority faculty members, departments need to worry about more than the competition from other schools, Torres said

"They also need to make sure that if those minority and female candidates are selected that they create a support system for them when they get here," he said.

"When departments that historically had no representation of women or minorities hire somebody from these groups, often they feel isolated and in many cases they don't stay here. They end up leaving after a year or two, and so the entire effort is wasted."

Ironically, one of Thandeka's rivals for the position in the philosophy department was California Civil Rights Initiative co-author Thomas Woods.

The CCRI, an initiative that would eliminate state affirmative action programs, will be on the ballot next November if its supporters gather the 694,000 signatures needed by Feb. 21.

Like Proposition 187, constitutional challenges to the CCRI are likely to keep it mired in the state's courts.

If it emerges from the courts intact, recruitment and outreach efforts will remain unaffected. But it will have other effects, Torres said.

"If a faculty search committee was using race and ethnicity in its consideration for a position, they would no longer be able to do so," he said.

The initiative would also send a negative message about diversity.

"People will take it as a signal that they no longer have to be concerned about diversity, they no longer have to be concerned that a diverse faculty is something that is important," he said.

Renewed commitment

During a speech at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in October, SF State President Robert A. Corrigan pledged a renewed commitment to diversity.

"Affirmative action is here to stay at SF State," he told the congregation. "Seventy percent of the faculty hired in the last seven years are women and people of color," he said.

The number is actually 76 percent for tenured and tenure-track faculty hires from 1988 to 1995, according to SF State's statistics on tenured and tenure-track hires.

In other words, 24 percent of those hired in the eight-year period were white males.

Thirty-two percent of the 276 faculty members hired during the period were white women. Only 43 percent of those hired were members of minority groups.

At those rates, the university projects it will hire 98 whites and 74 minorities over the next five years.

As long as the university continues to hire fewer minorities than whites, the stated long-term goals of SF State's affirmative action policy -- to achieve diversity in the university's faculty that mirrors that of its student body -- will never be reached.

"Until this administration takes a proactive stance in a real serious commitment to affirmative action, the data's going to stay the same," said Shipp. "You cannot go by what policies say. You cannot go by what administrators tell you. You have to go by the behavior, you have to look at the data."

Torres does not dispute that the intended goals of affirmative action policies at SF State are far from being reached.

"Recent hiring activity shows at least a serious attempt toward increasing the representation," Torres said. "But overall it has not had a dramatic impact on the bottom line."

[ Golden Gater Online November 14, 1995 ]

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