Thriving at UCI: Interventions To Support Leadership, Scholarship and Service Equity for Underrepresented Faculty

Graduate Student Researcher: Peiyi Wang

Underrepresented minority (URM) faculty at UCI faces unique challenges to their thriving in our campus community and, relatedly, the UCI campus faces challenges to retaining URM faculty.

How do we retain our underrepresented faculty and help them thrive?

Informed by positive organizations scholarship and evidence-based research on faculty retention, we designed three interventions.

1) Supporting Leadership

Elevate Women Initiative builds on the activities both PIs already organized in recognition of the challenges associated with intersectional identities for URM women faculty, upon these faculty’s request.
This programming provides a series of workshops that build community and provide professional development resources, including tools that strengthen skills and confidence in strategic relationship building, negotiating at work, effective meeting organization, peer coaching, and professional self-presentation (modeled after the UC Women’s Initiative). Furthermore, it addresses URM-specific challenges, including structural racism and sexism, work/family issues, invisible service load, microaggressions, questioning authority and credibility in the classroom, and other professional needs of the group as requested.
We anticipate that the implementation of the Elevate Women program will elevate resources and visibility, and improve climate and retention among female URM faculty (the group most at risk for faculty departure from UCI).
Our inaugural cohort was successfully recruited. We have two amazing groups of (Assistant and Associate) professors enrolled in the program. Please stay tuned for future calls for application.

2) Supporting Scholarship

At a research university, success in scholarship is necessary for faculty advancement. Because URM faculty are disproportionately burdened by service commitments, it is imperative to provide protected time for research writing.
To address this issue, we have further developed the existing U See I Write Initiative and recruited our inaugural Annual U See I Write Faculty Writing Cohort.
There are two components of the new U see I write program.

Participants attend nine half-day (3-hr) writing retreats, one in each month throughout the Academic Year. Each retreat includes a 30-minute training session covering topics including strategic planning for writing success, creating a weekly and daily writing schedule, protecting writing time from competing commitments, and building a mentorship network to support their writing. The remaining 2.5 hours are spent on writing, following the successful U See I Write writing retreat approach.
The retreat participants are divided into small groups of four to five faculty members who support each other in their writing and create an accountability mechanism. They are asked to check in with each other on a weekly basis and serve as each other’s “accountability buddies.” They are also asked to participate in joint, informal weekly writing sessions. We will make a dedicated room and coffee/snacks available for them to facilitate this structure when COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

We hope to support scholarship in terms of developing strategies to protect writing time and use available writing time efficiently. Moreover, these events will build a sense of community between URM and non-URM faculty in a setting that is not obviously racialized, but instead emphasizes a shared need and want to improve writing skills, and solidarity in working toward similar goals. On the whole, this will support research productivity, required for successful faculty advancement.
In the 2020-2021 cohort, we have successfully recruited 38 faculty participants. Please stay tuned for future calls for application.

3) Supporting Service Equity

Female faculty and URM faculty carry a disproportionate service burden, both in terms of the visible and invisible service they provide. A challenge related to this issue is that service load is not standardized to the degree teaching load expectations may be, nor is it easily quantified.
However, the fact that female faculty and URM faculty carry a higher service load and are also involved in more invisible service means that their service activities take away from their research time, which is incentivized more. This puts URM and female faculty at a disadvantage in the merit and promotion process.
We are currently developing a service matrix that helps make visible the often invisible work of women and faculty of color. The overall goal is to make the matrix adaptable enough to be applicable to units across campus and in a way that lends itself to the development of more specific unit-level assessment tools.
Invisible service and inequitable service contributions are a pervasive problem, not only at UCI but globally. While some service assessment matrices exist, there is, to our knowledge, not an instrument that also aims to quantify invisible service. Thus, the development of such a matrix is a significant and scalable contribution that has considerable promise for increasing service equity.

UCOP Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) Grant