In the wake of the results of the University's Kaleidoscope Report, which cast a grim light on the University's ability to retain minority and female faculty, the administration is devising new ways to address the problems raised.
The Report was commissioned by the Schools of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering from the outside consulting firm the Kaleidoscope Group in 2002, and was released to the public in Spring 2004.
Results showed that the retention rate for Caucasian male faculty was 70 percent, whereas the rate for African-American female faculty was zero percent. Women and minority retention rates in faculty were lower than 50 percent across the board.
Among the complaints of faculty interviewed were the difficulty of finding reasonably priced housing, low salaries, difficulty in achieving tenure, and a general lack of support from senior faculty.
Faculty of color especially emphasized this lack of support and, also, a low understanding and appreciation of diversity among the faculty.
"The same issues that affect all faculty affect women and minorities," Professor of Economics David Garman said, who is on the Executive Committee of Arts and Sciences and on the Equal Educational Opportunity Committee. "It just seems to hit them harder."
Furthermore, minority faculty reported a feeling of pressure from the added responsibility of having to informally mentor minority students.
The University has already made progress in certain areas. Last year, it converted the Hillside School in Medford into transitional housing for junior faculty.
Tufts has also instituted new policies for tenure in both schools, including a research semester for tenure-track faculty and an option for tenure-track female faculty to delay their tenure decision for a year if they have children.
In addition, a new faculty mentoring program has been established in Arts and Sciences this year under the auspices of Dean of Arts and Sciences Susan Ernst and Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences Kevin Dunn, who called the program "one of our most important responses to the Kaleidoscope Group report."
The program pairs a junior faculty member with a senior colleague in another department. This is the key to the program according to Dunn, because "while departmental mentoring is essential, junior faculty also needs to be able to confide in someone who will not be voting on their tenure case down the line."
Although the program is for all junior faculty, Dunn believes that it will be especially important for minority faculty, according to studies that show that these groups are less likely to receive good mentoring without a formal framework.
In the School of Engineering (SOE), where the loss of female faculty was "severe" according to the report, several moves have been initiated specifically to reach out to female and minority faculty. According to Dean of the School of Engineering Linda Abriola, four of seven new faculty members are women, and two are minority men.
In addition, two women in the SOE received research awards this year, which will allow them to take time off next year to pursue their fields of study.
"The point is," Abriola said, "we're not only recruiting the best faculty, we're doing everything we can to be supportive as they develop their careers at Tufts."
According to Abriola, faculty from both schools are now collaborating to develop an "umbrella organization to support the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups, both women and people of color, in math, science, and engineering." This group will provide support not only to faculty but also to undergraduate and graduate students.
Tufts has already offered several faculty workshops specifically addressing the more deeply-rooted problem of acceptance of diversity for the faculty as a whole. Director of Affirmative Action Yves-Rose SaintDic, who has participated in these workshops, made it clear that "doing diversity work is not as hard as getting to the moon - it's harder."
There are certain qualities of the University that are conducive to such work. SaintDic emphasized the importance of a commitment from leadership, in which area "we have been very lucky," she said.
"One mistake is that [administrators] think diversity is a one-shot deal," she said. "They have one day of diversity training and think that takes care of the problem, but it's more of a process."
Dunn said that the issue at Tufts is indeed mostly a matter of more support, as the problems brought up in the Report are rampant in schools everywhere.
Not only do women often face time management issues while juggling a career and a family, but also "certain fields have also been traditionally the domain of men," he said. "We need to re-double our efforts to make sure that we recruit and support women in those disciplines," he said.
As for minorities, Dunn said they "face a low-grade institutional racism at almost every turn, and we cannot work hard enough to push back against that."
Garman said that the most important step now is to focus on the present. The Kaleidoscope Report is now "out of date," he said.
"What we need to do now is keep working on the issues identified in it in part," Garman said, "but we also need to start communicating better with assistant professors and untenured faculty who are at Tufts now and asking them what kind of support they need."
While Tufts may have lost a significant amount of minority faculty in the past, "I see this as being good news," Dunn said.
"It is, in the long run, much more important that those faculty be valued in their professions as a whole than that Tufts hold them," he said. "It's our job just to keep trying to recruit more faculty of color."
One issue that sets Tufts apart from other universities, says Garman, is money. Because Tufts has a small endowment relative to other academically strong institutions, he said, "we're trying to compete with these schools for the best faculty but we don't have the resources to support the faculty when they get here."
In the 2004 Report, African-American men held a retention rate of 40 percent; Asian-American women, 50 percent; Asian-American men, 40 percent; Hispanic men, 25 percent; Hispanic women, 50 percent; and Caucasian women, 42 percent. All studied faculty were hired between the academic years 1990-1991 and 1995-1996.
