Why did you want to be a Provost’s fellow? What are you excited about?
Having served on the Roos Advocate for Community Change Recruitment and Retention Task Force, I was excited to join the team implementing recommendations to improve our faculty hiring practices. Faculty play a vital role in the educational development and success of our students. As a faculty member of color, I’ve experienced the effects of navigating narrowly-defined institutional norms while also performing the under-valued and precarious labor of challenging these norms so that students, staff, and faculty of color have access to more equitable conditions.
As a Provosts’ DEI Fellow, I serve on the Faculty Search Support Team. This group of faculty, staff and administrators understand that a diverse faculty will improve gaps in student success by providing more equitable support to our underserved student population. For instance, our Black and Latinx students’ student-to-faculty ratio is 24:1 compared to white students at 9:1. Engaging in an inclusive faculty hiring process is a critical point of intervention that we hope will address a long overdue issue.
What do you hope to accomplish this year? Are there any particular goals? What do you think the legacy of your work will be?
Ultimately, we’d like to better support our students, faculty, and staff of color by increasing faculty diversity. With well over 75 faculty searches underway and a commitment to meet with each search committee twice, we have our work cut out for us. In these meetings, we provide research-informed recommendations, strategies, and tools that support intentional engagement in inclusive hiring practices, including strategies to mitigate our biases and hold each other accountable. We also hope to gain broad faculty and administrative support this year, and, if we’re successful, I’m hopeful that this initiative can demonstrate the necessity of shared responsibility in order to adequately address inequitable policies, practices, and structures that negatively impact our faculty, staff, and students of color.
How does your research or role as faculty member inform your interest and work in DEI?
My experiences as a precariously employed, under-classified worker and as a woman of color in a predominantly white institution and profession have shaped my perspectives, my research, and my work in DEI. I joined UMKC over 13 years ago on a temporary, grant-funded academic appointment before moving into the status of ranked, non-tenure track faculty librarian. These experiences have led me to conduct research on grant-funded digital libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) workers. The Collective Responsibility labor forums brought grant funders, LAM administrators, and contingent workers together to collaboratively design worker-centered interventions into the grant application and reporting processes, and to develop a toolkit of resources designed to shift the conditions of contingent workers. As a result, I believe in designing interventions and co-creating structures that mitigate harm and allow for collective approaches that will move us from critical examination to transformational action.