Panel Session - Effective Strategies to Diversify Engineering Faculty

What role do department chairs and deans play in ensuring faculty diversity? This panel presents strategies developed in several contexts including those that were the focus of a year-long collaborative project on increasing the diversity of engineering faculty. While there are many guides to diversity, quite often these guides are prescriptions written by diversity consultants and rarely by academics within science and engineering. The panelists discuss strategies that they have employed and their personal assessments of the effectiveness of these strategies. Panelists encouraged to share both those that were successful as well as those strategies that were not in order to develop better methods of recruiting, retaining, and advancing a diverse professoriate. Proposed panelists are from institutions of different types in the Southwest, therefore a focus was both on improving gender diversity and ethnic diversity among engineering faculty