According to John Staddon, professor of experimental psychology, the University's current efforts to fund race-based faculty recruitment are misguided.
But his challenge to the black faculty initiative has met with criticism from faculty and administrators who say that institutional support for such recruitment and hiring is necessary.
In a May 11 address to the Academic Council, Staddon asked the council to endorse a resolution calling on the University to terminate "all university-wide plans for race-based faculty hiring... as soon as practicable."
By intentionally targeting black faculty for specific positions, the University is "funding racial discrimination," he said.
The black faculty initiative, known officially as "A Strategic Plan for Black Faculty Development 1994," was begun in 1988 and revised and approved by the Academic Council in 1994 to retain and recruit black faculty at the University.
But other faculty members maintain that Staddon's proposal is impractical and inappropriate.
Mel Peters, associate professor of religion, said that Staddon's position on black faculty recruitment ignores deeper issues involved in recruitment of any kind.
"What people who object to [affirmative action programs] fail to take into account is that the status quo as they know it is already tilted in favor of certain types of individuals," he said.
"There is [in these objections] a presumption of neutrality, of a kind of zero point we can get to where all of our past experiences can be forgotten--and therein lies the flaw [in the argument]," he said.
George Wright, vice provost and director of African and Afro-American Studies, said the black faculty initiative is intended "to broaden the field of emphasis" in recruitment efforts and compensate for the narrow focus of such efforts in the past, he said.
Staddon's proposal also deals with the particular methods of faculty recruitment.
Recruiting is the job of departments, not the University, and the proposal would simply return such responsibility to those departments, Staddon said. If they then wished to target black faculty for particular positions, departments would be allowed to do so--but without any assistance, financial or otherwise, from the administration.
"I don't believe there should be monies allocated at the level of the university for the hiring of black faculty, or any faculty, based on race," Staddon said in an interview.
The money in question is the $500,000 Black Faculty Recruitment Fund established by the president and the provost. The fund allows departments to be more flexible in their recruiting efforts for black faculty, said Provost John Strohbehn.
If a black faculty member were hired as a part of a special, race-based recruiting effort, the fund would pay for 100 percent of the cost of the position for the first year, 66 percent for the second year, and 33 percent for the third year, with the cost difference being paid for by the department.
This year, the fund was used to pay for new black faculty members in the cultural anthropology department, as part of that department's efforts to offer more courses on black culture, said Roy Weintraub, acting dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The fund gave the department the flexibility to offer positions to two of the four candidates who came out of the two-year search, he said.
As a part of his proposal, Staddon said that the administration should stop involving itself in any hiring initiatives, but both Weintraub and Strohbehn said that no such involvement currently exists.
"Staddon seems to have the idea that there is a university that makes decisions about faculty hires which differs from departments--and that's absolutely not the case," Weintraub said. "The dean doesn't go out and recruit faculty--departments do. All I do is authorize departments to do what they've told me they want to do. The provost certainly doesn't recruit faculty. The provost doesn't even have a budget to recruit," he said.
But Staddon said that even if no direct intervention occurs, the fund is a de facto push by the administration to hire black faculty and carries with it an unfair "opportunity cost." That money could also go to help departments that are not as well-funded, such as Canadian studies, he said.
Staddon also said that the fund would not increase the number of black faculty in areas in which they are traditionally underrepresented, such as the sciences. "It will tend to bring to the University black faculty in disciplines where black faculty are well-represented." Those departments will tend to have larger pools of black faculty from which to choose, and will be more likely to use the fund to bring them to the University, he said.
Some faculty, however, question the psychological ramifications of the fund. When black faculty paid for by the fund realize that they are not being hired along traditional lines, "the fund can be an annoyance," as it reinforces the idea that they are different, religion professor Peters said.
Ken Knoerr, a professor in the School of the Environment who supported Staddon's address, echoed these sentiments. The black faculty initiative "is something we should revisit," he said.
"No matter how able a person is, if they are not hired on the basis of [teaching and research quality alone], there will always be questions hanging over them," he said.
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