Diversity concerns have led most of Columbia’s schools to take measures to enhance faculty and pipeline diversity.
“Our faculty are not as diverse as the people are in the communities we serve,” School of Nursing Dean Bobbie Berkowitz said. Both the students and the faculty, she said, “need to better reflect the minority and ethnic populations we work with.”
The School of Nursing is one of 12 of Columbia’s 14 graduate schools to submit three-year plans to the Provost’s office outlining ways to make themselves more diverse. Some schools have plans to be more attentive to affirmative action in admissions and job applications, while others will plan more events to make underrepresented minorities feel more included.
Andrew Davidson, vice provost for academic planning, said this individualized approach will be more successful than a unified University-wide initiative due to the differing natures of diversity at each school.
Although all plans are similar in their goal, they vary as to the specific steps that will be taken and the timeline with which policies will be implemented.
“There is not a one-size-fits-all way of fixing diversity that would be successful,” he said.
The proposals are the result of meetings between Davidson, former Provost Claude Steele, and the leadership of each of the Columbia schools during the spring 2011 term to discuss diversity on campus.
Davidson said that some schools have shown interest in enhancing mentoring programs or bridge programs, with which his office plans to assist. Davidson and Interim Provost John Coatsworth also plan to meet with the deans regularly to check on progress.
Davidson would not say which two schools had yet to submit their proposals. Coatsworth wrote in an email to faculty in December, “To date, 12 of 14 schools have submitted plans and the remaining two are working to finalize theirs.” At the time, Coatsworth said he hoped to pass along the plans to University President Lee Bollinger by “early in the new year.”
Berkowitz said she considers diversity to be a major goal for the School of Nursing and is focused on creating a culture of inclusion so that “our actions, and who we are, and what we care about, makes people feel that we are a place for someone like them,” regardless of their race or ethnicity.
The nursing school has a diversity and culture team that provides mentors for minority students and faculty at the school and organizes events to promote and celebrate diversity.
No matter what background a new hire comes from, “We want them to feel comfortable here,” she said.
Of nearly a dozen students interviewed, every one said they thought the University needed to be more diverse.
“I feel like the majority of the faculty does not look like me,” John Hamilton, CC ’13, who is black, said. Hamilton said he believes the University needs to “take an in-depth and critical look at it [their recruitment practices] to see if it could be excluding people who could bring new perspectives to campus.”
He also said he thinks mentoring programs for underrepresented minorities would be beneficial to the University. “Underrepresented minorities do better when they have someone to look up to,” he said.
Scarlett Vialovos, GS, agreed that the faculty needs to be more diverse. “I haven’t seen many professors of color,” she noted.
At the School of Social Work, diversity “doesn’t appear to be there,” Russell Chou, SSW, said.
Administrators said they would take a more critical look at the way they recruit applicants, both for students and faculty.
Kerith Gardner, the director of faculty affairs and special projects at the Business School, said that, prompted by these reports, she plans to “look further and deeper for good high-quality candidates” from underrepresented minorities and women.
“I think we’ve made important strides in recent years, but we strive for greater diversity,” Gardner said. She believes there is greater diversity in undergraduates and Ph.D. candidates than in tenured faculty “because of the increased awareness of the benefits of diversity over the past decades,” she said.
The Law School plans to ensure it is giving serious consideration to diverse applicants, mentoring the diverse junior faculty, and diversifying at the senior level, Dean David Schizer said in an email.
Since 2005, Schizer said 39 percent of the 28 new faculty members have been women, and 22 percent have been people of color. In the class of 2014, 48 percent of those admitted were women and 38 percent were people of color. All of the data represent a significant increase in diversity from a few decades ago, he said.
Davidson said there is nothing more important than diversity at a university. “We believe it enhances the excellence of the whole academic experience,” he said. “If we want our educated class to represent society, they have to give everyone a field they can succeed in.”
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