Recruiting Faculty and Staff

Challenge

Higher Education is becoming an increasingly competitive world for attracting underrepresented minorities to faculty and staff positions.

Actions

We believe that hiring qualified minority candidates for faculty and staff positions is highly pertinent to attracting and retaining underrepresented students. In order to support this activity, we’ve appointed divisional diversity officers with a primary focus on identifying, attracting and retaining highly qualified minority faculty, staff and students in their respective division or department.

Outcomes

A change in funding from NY State (NYSUNY 2020) has presented a unique opportunity for the University to increase the number of minority faculty members as part of the hiring initiative that is now underway. Working together, different layers of the University administration are encouraging and incentivizing departments to broaden their candidate pool to include more minority candidates; this is a challenging project given the small number of available candidates and the competitive salaries they can garner from other campuses. Nonetheless, we have been able to increase the number of underrepresented minority faculty from 37 in 2011 to 54 in 2015—a 45% increase. A similar increase in underrepresented minority staff has also occurred.

Contact

Harvey Stenger

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