Faculty Equity Advisors
Faculty Equity Advisors are senior faculty members who provide information and advice about practices for advancing excellence, equity and diversity in faculty recruitment at UCSF.
In particular, we focus our efforts in these ways:
Facilitating Effective Processes for Faculty Recruitment
Educating about best practices to ensure a diverse search committee and advising on proactive search procedures to enhance the diversity of the search pool and counter applicant selection bias.
For more information and helpful resources, please visit the Faculty Recruitment Best Practices and Resources page.
Monitoring Search Processes and Outcomes
Reviewing and approving the search plan, applicant pool, and short list.
To learn more about the work of Faculty Equity Advisors, click through the below areas of work:
Chancellor Hawgood includes "Equity and Inclusion" as one of the 4 priorities of his administration (2015 State of the University address).
The 2013 UCSF Diversity Strategic Plan: Roadmap to Inclusive Excellence calls for the integration of diversity into the full range of academic planning, execution, and program review.
- Enhancing faculty diversity is of paramount importance to the UCSF mission and requires a concerted, focused effort to make steady and necessary gains.
- Diversity is defined broadly.
- New faculty will shape the future of UCSF.
- A diverse faculty is linked to excellence.
- Faculty should share UCSF's values of equity, inclusion, diversity and educating diverse students and trainees.
The campus should provide information, coordination, and assistance in the area of equity and diversity to all departments and schools. The Equity Advisor will operate in collaboration with the following:
- Vice Provost of Academic Affairs
- Vice and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs
- Academic Senate EQOP Committee
- Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity
The role of a Faculty Equity Advisor is to ensure that excellence, equity and diversity are considered in all aspects of faculty recruitment and hiring.
- Meet with the search committee (or communicate with search committee chair) at least once to discuss proactive search procedures and applicable affirmative action and labor laws.
- Provide information to search committee on Best Practices for searches, including the impact of selection bias and how to counter biases (Unconscious Bias) in the academic search process.
- Provide advice as needed to ensure that proactive search practices are used for recruiting and selecting new faculty, including posting the search ad in multiple venues to attract diverse applicants and conducting extensive personal outreach.
- Provide advice as needed to the search committee to ensure that contributions to diversity are a component of the selection criteria. (See the Contributions to Diversity Statement page for more detailed information and resources.)
- Recommend and encourage search committees to use evaluation tools that facilitate objective evaluation of candidates.
- Support the committee with difficult situations. (E.g. unsolicited information about a candidate, conflicts of interest, de-selection of candidate that seems unfair.)
- Serve on a select number of search committees (if additional assistance is needed).
The Faculty Equity Advisor will review and approve the search plan, applicant pool, and short list.
- Monitor the processes and outcomes of the search at all stages – Search plan, applicant pool, and short list.
- Prior to approving the Search Plan, verify that each committee is diverse (committee comprised of at least 50% women (or men in School of Nursing) or URM members).
- Review the diversity of the applicant pool relative to the availability pool. Suggest proactive measures to enhance the diversity of the applicant pool if it does not reasonably reflect the diversity of the availability pool.
- Review the short list of candidates selected for interviews. Encourage further proactive outreach efforts if few candidates and/or short lists do not reflect the demographics of the applicant pool.