Originally published in Synapse on April 21, 1980.
The month of March is notorious for political surprises. On the “Ides of March” Caesar was stabbed in the Roman Senate. On March 18th this year UC went to a routine budget hearing in Sacramento and encountered an angry group of minority faculty from UCSF.
In the Assembly Ways and Means Subcommittee on Education, the bone of contention was 59 health science teaching positions (FTEs) that UC (systemwide) wants for the coming year.
The representatives from the UCSF School of Dentistry Council of Minority Faculty testified that these teaching positions are needed, but that UC should be made to recruit more women and minorities to fill them.
“Why should they use minorities and women to get money and then ignore them?” asked Dr. Nelson Artiga, of the Minority Council.
What Dr. Artiga was referring to is the 68 FTEs that UC got in 1978. The legislature had granted UC those FTEs attached to “supplemental language” indicating that minorities and women should be recruited to fill them.
But according to Dr. Artiga, “we felt the level of effort to recruit minorities and women was miserable.”
Zero Blacks
UC did not agree. In a statement issued by President Saxon’s office in 1979, the university claimed that “recruitment efforts have been aimed at the broadest possible audiences for the relevant specialty, and particularly at women and minorities.” At the Mar. 18 hearing, UC reported that 49 of the 68 FTEs had been filled. Forty-two Caucasians, five Asians, one Mexican, and 1 East Indian were hired.
“One Hispanic? Zero Blacks?” retorted dental school minority recruitment and retention coordinator Larry Broussard, “what kind of statistics are those for the state of California?” It was not just the fate of the FTEs, however, that brought Broussard, Dr. Artiga and Dr. Louis Gonzales to Sacramento.
The virtually unprecedented trip to the legislature had its genesis last October when UCSF minority faculty members from the schools of medicine, pharmacy and dentistry met to form the UCSF Council of Minority Faculty and Academic Administrators.
It was the consensus of this campus-wide council, said Dr. Artiga, that “benign neglect” is the university’s attitude toward the recruitment and retention of minority faculty. The members of the new campus-wide minority council were particularly disturbed because, they say, the university did not inform them of the 68 FTEs.
On Nov. 2, after state officials told the campus-wide minority council about the 68 FTEs — 17 of which were given to UCSF — Dr. Artiga wrote a letter to UCSF Vice Chancellor Dr. Shirley Chater requesting information on the number of FTEs currently being recruited for at UCSF.
Hostage FTEs
By Mar. 18, however, the campus-wide minority council had still received no reply from Dr. Chater’s office. It was this state of affairs that prompted the subcommittee to call Dr. Chater to Sacramento. “We were holding those FTEs hostage,” said Broussard.
On Mar. 24, Chater told the subcommittee that UCSF had filled 43 FTEs in the past year. Five Asians, two East Indians, two “Spanish surname” individuals, one American Indian and 14 women were hired.
“The point I made in my testimony,” said Dr. Chater, “is that I think we are doing a very, very fine job with minority and women recruitment based on these statistics for one year.” “I don’t think we have quite as much as we could,” she told Synapse, “but I think the process we have in place is a good one.”
When asked about the total lack of Blacks recruited, however, Dr. Chater waffled. “Oh, I think we probably have to do more outreach and more active kinds of things,” she said. “I’m not completely satisfied with the process.”
The problem, Dr. Chater claimed, is that there aren’t very many qualified Blacks available. Women and minorities, she said, started entering colleges and professional schools in greater numbers just eight years ago, so it will be a few years before the “availability pools” for women and minorities grow.
“Right now the difficulty is where do you find them,” said Dr. Chater.
Dr. Chater admitted to Synapse, however, that the UCSF minority council’s ignorance of the 68 FTEs indicated a “problem with communication.” But she said that her “delayed response” (she answered the council’s letter on Mar. 20) “was in no way because I didn’t want to give them the information.”
Recruiting techniques
The problem, said Dr. Chater, was that the computer data on faculty openings at UCSF wasn’t analyzed and ready for release last fall. In addition, she said, the minorities, for some reason, didn’t know that “search books” listing all the current faculty openings, are available at all times in her office.
The upshot of the March hearings was that the education subcommittee attached more “supplemental language” to this year’s 59 FTEs. Said subcommittee member Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara): “My impression is when it comes to faculty recruitment efforts the university doesn’t have such a good record.”
The drafting of the new supplemental language, however, only fanned the flames of controversy. While the minority representatives pushed for specific language requiring the university to advertise faculty openings “in a broad array of minority publications, such as Ebony or Nuestro in addition to the traditional national and specialty publications,” UC posed such language. UC won.
The supplemental language, which was drafted, which is not financially binding, merely requests that UC “make a greater effort to recruit and promote qualified minorities to become tenured health science faculty.”
“The university has said they have trouble recruiting minorities, yet they resist any innovative or creative recruitment techniques,” said Broussard. “If I see ‘equal opportunity employer’ in a recruitment ad in a professional journal... I don’t think they mean it. But if I were to see an ad in Ebony or a local Black periodical, I know these people are legitimately concerned about recruiting Blacks. Because they’re coming into the community.”
All possible efforts
“They will make ‘all possible efforts to recruit minorities’,” mimicked Broussard. “What the hell does that mean? That means keep on doing what you’ve been doing, nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“I have no problem with it,” said Dr. Chater of the supplemental language. “We do it anyhow.” She said she was opposed, however, to placing advertisements in “this so-called broad array of publications, because there is no limit to the definition of ‘broad.’
“If we are going to advertise in Ebony, then we’d better advertise in the Ladies Home Journal,” said Dr. Chater. Now, I also feel that Ebony i and the Ladies Home Journal and other kinds of publications that reach a broad audience are not professional magazines, they’re not read, presumably, by the professional faculty we’re looking for.”
Despite the controversy over the adequacy of the supplemental language, the Sacramento showdown has had its effects. According to Dr. Chater, she plans to meet in May with dental school officials to discuss their affirmative action plan, the “communication problem” and the possibility of relaying all notices of dental school faculty openings directly to the minority council.
Though school of dentistry minority council members maintain that the minority recruitment and retention problem is campus and university wide, Dr. Chater comments that “the other schools’ faculties didn’t go to Sacramento, and you have to start somewhere.”
In addition to this specific work with the dental school, however, Dr. Chater plans to present a forum this spring to inform women and minorities in all schools of the necessary requirements for tenure.
Retention
Though the issue of “retention” of minority faculty was only briefly touched upon in Sacramento, minority faculty leaders and the UC Academic Senate Committee on Affirmative Action agree that it is currently a more critical issue that even the recruitment of minority faculty.
“FTEs for minorities, without minorities getting tenure doesn’t mean a damn thing,” said Dr. Artiga. Without tenure, faculty members have no job security and cannot be members of the UCSF Academic Senate or the faculty councils of their schools; groups which make many of the decisions which affect all faculty.
“Women and ethnic minorities are not promoted to tenure at the same rate as are non-minority males,” reported the UC Academic Senate Affirmative Action Committee in 1979. The statistics from the UCSF Affirmative Action Office support their statement.
These statistics show that while UCSF has 313 Caucasian tenured faculty members, there are only 28 tenured minorities of which 18 are Asian males. There is only one minority woman — an Asian — with tenure.
The number of non-tenured minorities in tenure-track positions — those that can lead to tenure — is also small. While there are 79 non-tenured, tenure track Caucasian faculty members, only 11 non-tenured minority are on the tenure track. While Dr. Chater says UCSF needs to “do a lot more” to retain minority faculty, she says the campus “is committed to helping women and minorities be retained once they are here.”
But the decision to promote faculty members to tenure — as well as the decision to hire specific faculty members — ultimately comes down to individual departments. It is in the individual departments, some minority faculty members claim, that minority faculty members are sometimes discriminated against.
Members of the campuswide minority council claim that minority faculty members often receive little support from their departments in their struggle to be relieved from excessive teaching loads and get the funds to do the research upon which tenure depends. They also claim that in some cases the research quality and productivity of minority faculty members is unfairly disparaged by department authorities.
In recent months two particular cases have emerged in the School of Dentistry which some minorities claim demonstrate this discrimination.
According to Dr. Gonzales, in 1978 he and co-researcher Dr. Artiga were turned down by the School of Dentistry for a research grant.
Drs. Gonzales and Artiga persisted with their project, however, and in 1979 received an affirmative action research grant form Dr. Chafer’s office. They completed their project, and this February their paper was accepted for presentation at the International Association of Dental Research (IADR) conference this summer in Japan.
“Only the best papers in the world were accepted for presentation,” said Dr. Gonzales. “The thing “that this demonstrates is the whole pattern of discrimination in the School of Dentistry.”
One of the two other UCSF School of Dentistry papers accepted for presentation at the IADR conference was that of Dr. Irene Savostin-Asling, a dental school Council of Minority Faculty member whose tenure dispute has become, according to the council, a gross example of race/sex discrimination in the tenure process.
Though Dr. Savostin-Asling’s promotion is currently being reviewed by the UCSF Academic Senate Committee on Academic Personnel, she was denied tenure last summer. And in recent months her situation has drawn letters of inquiry from Assemblyman Willie Brown and Student Regent Hector Cruz Lozano.
After reading the case study on the Savostin-Asling case prepared by the School of Dentistry Council of Minority Faculty, Lozano wrote to UCSF Chancellor Francis Sooy saying that “based on the information provided, it seems that Dr. Savostin-Asling’s denial for tenure was unwarranted. It appears, based on the booklet provided,” wrote Lozano, “that Dr. Savostin-Asling is an asset to your campus and the community.”
Letters form Dr. Chater in May and August of 1979, which are included in the case study, explain that Dr. Savostin-Asling has been denied promotion to a tenure position because of “limited evidence of research and creative achievement.”
Dr. Chafer’s letter of May 21, however, acknowledges that Dr.Savostin-Asling’s “teaching excellence was noted with the highest commendation as well as the numerous national and local activities associated with the profession, community and campus.”
Indeed, as the case study documents, Dr. Savostin-Asling has won the UCSF Association of Dental Students Excellence in Teaching Award for five out of the seven years she has taught at UCSF. In addition, more than 90 per cent of UCSF dental students have signed petitions supporting her promotion to tenure.
Research
Appointment to tenure, however, is based on research as well as teaching and university and community service. But the minority council of the School of Dentistry claims that Dr. Savostin-Asling has indeed excelled at research, despite numerous obstacles thrown in her path by her department.
According to a computer search of the literature reproduced in the Savostin-Asling case study, Dr. Savostin-Asling has produced more research papers in the last seven years than some of the tenured faculty members in her department.
An Index Medicus search by Dr. Savostin-Asling shows that she published more research in the last seven years than a white male professor who received tenure in the School of Dentistry three years ago.
But the tenured members of Dr. Savostin-Asling’s department voted against her promotion. According to Dr. Savostin-Asling, it was probably their disapproval that cost her her tenure.
Dr. Chater, as well as Drs. Ben Pavone and Thomas Christie, Dean and Associate Dean of the School of Dentistry, and Dr. Sol Silverman, Chairman of Dr. Savostin-Asling’s department, refused to comment on the Savostin-Asling case.
Larry Broussard, dental school recruitment and retention coordinator went to Sacramento to criticize UC’s minority faculty recruitment and retention efforts.
UCSF minority faculty members charge that Dr. Savostin-Asling (above) was discriminated against when her tenure was recently denied.
