Disheartened by the lack of black faculty in the University of California at Berkeley's College of Engineering, a group of black graduate engineering and science students at the university is attempting to remedy the problem by creating an on-line directory of black doctoral candidates and recipients in the sciences.
The directory, titled "The Future Black Faculty Database: A Registry of Tomorrow's Teachers," is intended to increase the number of minorities in academia by making their presence known to colleges and universities -- the people who do the hiring, said Robert Stanard, treasurer of Berkeley's Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students association.
"We wanted to develop a database of Ph.D. students in the sciences in search of tenure-track positions and that could be viewed by prospective college" employers, he said.
Members of the Berkley group are responsible for designing and maintaining the page, which covers scientific disciplines ranging from aerospace engineering to physics.
The page is located on the World Wide Web at the address http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu.
College Director of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Mary Childers said she was "impressed by the files I have looked at so far" on the Future Black Faculty Directory and has passed the directory's address on to Thayer School of Engineering dean Elsa Garmire for use in faculty hiring.
Yet Childers was quick to note that on-line and print directories of minority faculty are not the primary source of faculty recruiting.
"The major source of all recruitment is advertisements in the journals of all disciplines," Childers said.
Childers also said the College places advertisements in academic journals aimed at minorities and encourages graduate school professors to send faculty lists of their most talented students, who the College then contacts.
"We encourage them to include women and minorities," Childers said.
The project began with discussions with Berkeley administrators about the absence of black faculty in the university's College of Engineering.
"We've had several conversations with faculty" on the lack of black faculty members, said Jeff Forbes, a member of the Berkley organization.
"They weren't really in the pipeline" to recruit minority candidates, Forbes said.
While the directory uses Berkeley computer facilities, Stanard said, funding came from Berkeley's "various colleges ... money not earmarked for the page particularly."
