Calendar year 1996 has brought with it the implementation of SP-2, the measure approved by the Regents last July that forbids the University from using race or gender as criteria in its employment and contracting practices. The Regents' action extends to faculty employment practices and as such UC is now operating under a different set of faculty employment regulations than it was in 1995. The question is, what practical effect will these changes have?
The consensus answer seems to be: very little, if the only consideration is the rules governing the way UC selects faculty from among candidates or promotes faculty through the ranks. On the other hand, a tool that some faculty regard as very important for the recruitment of women and minorities was taken away just prior to the Regents' action, and there is concern that the symbolic effects of the Regents vote will make departments less enthusiastic about diversifying.
"I think that much of the effect SP-2 will depend on how deeply the attitudes of faculty have been affected by it," says Trevor Chandler, UC's executive director of academic affirmative action and diversity. "All hiring and promotion decisions have a subjective component to them," he says; the question is whether SP-2 will work to foster a more negative attitude among faculty toward the diversification of departments.
Conversely, William Schonfeld, the longtime dean of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, speculates that UC may now be more successful in diversifying its academic ranks. "If anything, the Regents decision has heightened the commitment of those who were committed [to affirmative action] before. Meanwhile, other colleagues who were not committed before are not committed now to blocking affirmative action; they simply feel vindicated."
All parties seem agreed that UC is not in for any major changes simply as a result of the alterations SP-2 has brought about in written faculty employment regulations. This is so because, first, these changes are necessarily small. To comply with state and federal regulations, UC still will be required to establish goals for hiring women and minorities in accordance with their "underutilization" in academic units; to carry out targeted recruitment efforts for them; and to collect data on the status of its affirmative action efforts.
What state and federal regulations do not require is race or gender preferences in hiring selection and, accordingly, such preferences will now be forbidden under SP-2. But there is near-universal agreement that academic hiring decisions have rarely been made on this basis in the past. "I think we can say with absolute conviction that race and gender have not been determining factors in hiring," says Donald Friedman, a former Committee on Academic Personnel chair at Berkeley and current vice-chair of the University Committee on Academic Personnel. "My sense is that [these rule changes] will have almost no effect."
Nevertheless, the Regents action, and some administrative decisions that preceded it, are expected to make a difference at UC. Through order of President Peltason last June, the University has eliminated its Target of Opportunity-Diversity program (TOPD) under which chancellors could grant departmental requests for "extra" FTE in order to hire promising women or minority faculty. The regular Target of Opportunity program remains a campus option, but what has been lost with the elimination of TOPD is the ability to set aside FTEs to further affirmative action goals. Departments at campuses utilizing TOP will still be able to make requests for FTE based on a desire to hire women or minority candidates, but the TOP FTE "pool" must be available for all kinds of requests.
Some programs that go under the heading of "faculty development" have likewise been altered. The President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program has, since 1984, provided financial support and mentoring to promising women and minority postdocs, some of whom have then come to UC -- and some to other institutions -- as tenure-track faculty. Though such a program is not an employment effort, strictly defined, the program's advisory committee has agreed, for the present year at least, to accept applications from candidates without regard to race or gender, even though the "targeted nature" of the program will remain in place.
UC's Summer Research Stipends and Pre-Tenure Development Awards programs have undergone a similar change. In the past, UCOP's Chandler says, these programs could be targeted toward junior women and minority faculty; now, he says, "they will be open to all junior faculty." Some campuses, Chandler says, have said the criteria they will now use for awards selection will include the burden of committee work a junior faculty member takes on or extra departmental work with students. The pre-tenure award provides release time from regular duties so that a junior faculty member can concentrate on research, while summer research stipends seek the same end through means of a financial award.