DAPS - Faculty & Staff Diversity

Key Indicator D3. Faculty and Staff Diversity.

A diverse faculty and staff enriches our educational and scholarly community and provides key supports to students. Over the past ten years, Portland State has invested significantly in efforts to increase the ethnic diversity of its tenure-related faculty and to create an inclusive campus climate that will benefit all employees (and, of course, our students; see Key Indicator C1). The attached table shows that ethnic diversity for all instructional faculty and for all classified staff has inched up to what must surely be considered a very small degree. For faculty, this is a common pattern in U.S. colleges and universities. During the 2008-2009 academic year, ODE will significantly broaden its diversity training offerings, and President Wiewel has ordered that a taskforce review the use of central funding for the support of new tenure-related faculty.

The data on instructional faculty must be received with great caution. The rate of instructional faculty at Portland State who have chosen not to identify their ethnicity in our institutional database is unusually high—9.7%, when this figure is usually about 3%. Early in the 2007-2008 academic year, ODE and OIRP designed a brief campus survey to solicit better information from faculty; that project was passed to Human Resources for review.

Three Comparisons of Data on Ethnicity:
Portland State Faculty and Classified Staff

Ethnicity of Instructional Faculty, Fall 1998 and Fall 2007

Ethnicity of Classified Employees, Fall 1998 and Fall 2007

Sources: HRIS December 1998 and OIRP-PSU Employee Extract Fall 2006

Note
Data provided David Burgess of OIRP. Attached are his data tables for Faculty 1998, Faculty 2007, Staff 1998, and Staff 2007.  This index page for Key Indicator D3 was written by Martha Balshem. Please e-mail comments to diversity@pdx.edu.