Grade is our Graduate student campaign to democratize the hiring and evaluation practices of UC faculty members. We are currently conducting a survey of department chairs in order to better understand how policies around graduate student involvement on hiring committees are being put into practice. We hope to use this information to collect best practices and propose new statewide standards for full, permanent representation on all hiring committees.
From Graduate Committee Chair Iman Sylvain:
Public institutes of higher education are needed to develop future leaders and innovators in all disciplines. The penultimate stages in preparation for many such individuals occurs in graduate or professional school, where personal mentorship from faculty is a crucial component. As graduate student representatives of the University of California Student Association, we believe that education operates most effectively and reliably when accountability is a guiding principle and diverse perspectives are solicited and incorporated. Strikingly, graduate and professional students widely report that they have not been solicited to assess the effectiveness of their faculty advisors’ mentorship, even after several years of study. When presented with inadequate mentorship, many of our peers have expressed an utter lack of recourse. This stands in sharp contrast to coursework, wherein student assessment are commonplace; and it highlights a troubling lack of accountability in graduate and professional education.
More alarmingly, current hiring and retention practices have failed to achieve a diverse professoriate, prompting concerns about the potential effects of bias and prejudice in the present system. The University of California acknowledges that it “lags behind in hiring [faculty] women and members of underrepresented groups.” Since 1994, men have constituted at least 70% of the University of California’s ladder rank faculty. In this timespan, the collective representation of African Americans, American Indians, Asians, and Chicano/Latino professors has never exceeded 27%. Reliable data on less obvious forms of diversity in personal experience, for example socioeconomic status, are unavailable. As graduate students, we are directly affected by the composition of the professoriate, and the present lack of faculty diversity contributes to the ostracizing of graduate students from underprivileged or underrepresented backgrounds and the perpetuation of bias and prejudice. We believe that graduate students have valuable perspectives to offer at each stage of faculty hiring and retention practices and that the University of California should revise their practices to reflect this reality. In 2013, 14% of ladder-rank faculty was aged 55 or older. As this faculty cohort retires in upcoming years, it is imperative that graduate students be included in the hiring and retention process of our mentors.
The replacement of faculty should manifest a vision shared by graduate students, faculty, staff, and administration. The Graduate Students of the University of California want to see faculty that are as diverse in identity, pedagogy, and epistemology as we are. We want to ensure that the University of California rewards and retains faculty who prioritize teaching and mentorship and that professors are held accountable for providing adequate guidance and support to their graduate students. Therefore, the University of California Student Association’s 2014-2016 campaign, Graduates for Accountability and Democracy in Education (Grade), seeks to institutionalize full involvement of graduate students in faculty hiring and retention practices and to develop a method of evaluating the quality of mentorship provided by faculty advisors.
