Concern over faculty hiring and promotion practices at UC Davis has prompted the administration and Academic Senate to launch investigations into the issues. Before the campus begins to fill an expected 500 faculty positions over the next five to seven years, several campus committees will examine this year how UC Davis can hire more women and minorities. Advisory committees were formed this month at each school and college, and a chancellor and provost's advisory committee will be selected in November from among those participants and other nominees. The faculty members will be asked to recommend best hiring practices from here and elsewhere, suggest improvements for the campus climate for women and minorities, and identify reasons for the decline in hiring women, Barry Klein, vice provost for academic personnel, said at the chancellor's brown-bag forum Monday. In addition, news that faculty salaries here are generally at or near the bottom in the UC system has prompted Academic Senate Chair Jeffery Gibeling to ask the senate's Executive Council to appoint a group to identify the factor affecting relative salaries and study UC Davis merit and promotion practices. At his fall-quarter brown-bag chat Monday, Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef said he was concerned about the decrease in the number of women hired into the faculty over the past two years, reporting that the hiring percentage was about half that of previous years. Less than 20 percent of the ladder-rank faculty members hired in the past two years have been women -- below the percentage that they represent in the overall UC Davis faculty. In certain fields, the nationwide pools include women at a much higher percentage than the UC Davis success rate in hiring them, Klein told Dateline. "There's no question we've done quite poorly," said Vanderhoef in response to a question from environmental design professor Gyongy Laky about hiring women into the faculty. The chancellor pointed out that since Jan. 1, 1996, after the UC regents outlawed the use of race, ethnicity or gender when hiring faculty and staff, the rules have changed on how to improve campus diversity. For instance, UC Davis has had to abandon its Target of Opportuniyty for Diversity Program, which earmarked faculty positions to provide departments with the opportunity to hire a hihgly qualified woman or minority member. Vanderhoef said UC Davis places a high value on diversity because it provides so many benefits to the campus community. In particular, he said, the diverse student body will be more successful when it can identify with the faculty. "The pursuit of diversity is part of our pursuit of excellence," Vanderhoef said. Bad reputation? Vice Provost Klein suggested at the brown-bag meeting that UC may be suffering from a bad reputation since passage of the UC regents' resolutions SP 1 and SP 2 in July 1995 and the state voters' passage of Proposition 209 in November 1996, which outlawed the use of race, ethnicity and gender as selection criteria in employment and admissions. He pointed out that several other UC campuses are experiencing similar difficulties in drawing women and minorities into their faculties."It's still out there -- 209, SP 1 and 2," Vanderhoef added. He said in his travels across the country he hears many perceptions of the California university climate that are not positive. Later in the day at the fall meeting of the Representative Assembly of the Academic Senate, Chair Gibeling noted that a report on average annual faculty salaries carried in the April 23 Chronicle of Higher Education showed UC Davis' professorial salaries to be the lowest or among the lowest of the UC campuses. That report shows that the average salary of UC Davis full professors is at the bottom of seven of the eight general UC campuses and that UC Davis has the lowest percentage of professors above Step VIII, currently the highest step. Full professors at UC Davis average $87,400 a year in salaries compared to $94,200 for professors at UC Santa Barbara, $96,6000 for professors at UC San Diego and $103,600 for professors at UC Berkeley. Gibeling has asked for a committee to look at whether this campus has tougher standards than others in the UC system. At his brown-bag session earlier in the day, Vanderhoef suggested that one reason for the difference in salaries may be the higher cost of housing in urban areas such as Berkeley and Los Angeles, which leads to more use of off-scale salaries at the time of hire. "In a related matter, a lengthy and spirited debate was held over the annual report of the senate Committee on Academic Personnel, which advises on merit pay, promotions and hires. Professor Beatriz Pesquera of Chicana/o studies made a motion to reject the report as a symbolic no-confidence message to the committee, but the motion failed for lack of a quorum. Winder McConnell, chair of the German and Russian department, read a prepared statement saying that members of the Academic Senate are "outraged" by decisions that have denied promotions, accelerations and new hires in the past few years. "Over the past few years, the confidence in the ability of CAP to ensure fair and equitable treatment to all members of the Academic Senate has eroded to the point where a number in the faculty at all levels, including many who have proceeded without difficulty through the system, have become frustrated and infuriated and demoralized," he said. "Such demoralization has reached its peak over the last year or two and many of us in this room, including deans, program directors and departmental chairs, believe that substantial, effective and long-term change is warranted if confidence in the personnel process is to be restored." A peculiar paradox McConnell said he wanted to remind the senate committee members of a peculiar paradox in the personnel review process, namely, that the degree of incompetency to judge independently the research record of any individual member of the academic senate increases in direct proportion to the power that is exercised by the reviewing body. He asked that the senate curtail that power. He criticized the personnel review process because faculty members are reviewing colleagues in disciplines in which the reviewers have no expertise. Part of the problem may be that few faculty members from the College of Letters and Science are willing to serve on the Committee on Academic Personnel, said Bob Hansen. He is a professor of molecular biosciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine and chair of the senate's Committee on Committees, which appoints all other senate committees. Associate Professor Inés Hernández Ávila said rejecting the report would be a positive move and that opposition to the actions of the Committee on Academic Personnel has been an exercise in shared governance for the Davis campus. "There's been an incredible cross-section of people...talking to each other about this," she said. Although no action was taken on the report, the senate will consider the issue further this year, according to Gibeling.