CPUC discusses faculty, graduate student diversification, entrepreneurship
Samvida VenkateshThe Council of the Princeton University Community discussed diversifying the faculty and graduate student bodies through creation of new fellowship programs and better recruitment at its monthly meeting on Monday.Dean of the Faculty Deborah Prentice said that the solution to increasing diversity lies in understanding the “pipeline” problem, which means that while 17 percent of the undergraduate population is made up of underrepresented minorities, this number falls to 7 percent in the graduate student population and almost completely disappears at higher levels, including postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty and senior faculty.Increasing faculty diversity will require a broad-based approach that tackles all stages of the pipeline, she said.Citing the Report of the Trustee Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity in 2013, Prentice noted the University has overall become more diverse since 1980, but has very little growth in the percentage of certain underrepresented minorities — blacks and Hispanics.The report recommends faculty initiatives, which include refining the search process to yield more female and underrepresented minority candidates by creating watch-lists and tracking potential candidates, and improving recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minorities by creating family-friendly initiatives and implementing cluster hiring, she added.“Historically, we have not paid much attention to [postdoctoral fellows] because they have been squirreled away in their labs across various parts of the campus, so much of the work lies in strengthening the sense of community amongst the post-docs,” Prentice said.Other initiatives include the development of a new competitive, honorific fellowship program to attract the top women and underrepresented minority candidates, she said.As for initiatives at the graduate student level, the work mainly lies in improving the selection process and creating bridge-year and summer programs to attract students who might not have otherwise considered graduate school, Prentice added.“The decision to hire a certain faculty finally lies with the academic department itself, so there needs to be strong leadership from faculty that are already in the department,” Prentice explained.She noted the molecular biology department of the University as a "best practice" case, where underrepresented minority populations in the graduate school went from 4 percent in 2008 to 24 percent in 2012, within the four years of the implementation of diversity programs.Prentice explained in the report's notes that the partnership between academic departments, administration and the Board of Trustees is key to setting up diversity and inclusion initiatives.