IRVINE, Calif.—University of California (UC)–Irvine announced in March it is joining three other UCs in using $2.3 million in federal grants to hire more Hispanic professors, citing ‘bias’ and unfair ‘barriers’ for lower numbers of Hispanic professors on UC campuses.
The effort is part of UC HIRE, an alliance across four UC campuses aimed at increasing Hispanic teaching professors in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Minority students learn better with professors from their same ethnic or racial background, or otherwise “look like them,” according to Brian Sato, a Biology professor leading the initiative at UC Irvine.
With the grant money, researchers from UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and UC San Diego will spend five years evaluating existing “barriers” they believe make it more difficult for Hispanics to obtain UC teaching positions. The researchers will then provide recommendations to university hiring committees based on their findings.
“We’re involved in changing how departments consider their hiring practices … to lead to a more diverse group of folks,” Sato told the Epoch Times.
The alliance also aims to share its guidelines across other University of California hiring departments.
“We want this to become the norm and part of the culture when departments do any faculty hires,” Sato noted when discussing the program’s long-term goals.
Participants applied for the grant with the goal of hiring more Hispanic staff, citing a 2021 UC demographic report showing that six percent of UC teaching faculty are from racial or ethnic minority groups.
One example of “barriers” to jobs cited by the alliance includes hirers relying on their personal networks to fill positions and advertising positions to applicants they know or have previously worked with.
Although UCs post all open positions publically, the alliance notes preferential treatment is often given to applicants that hirers know personally.
With the new funding, researchers will meet semi-monthly to discuss ways to increase Hispanic hires, and then, later, monthly to convey their findings to hiring committees.
