Report criticizes 'opportunity hiring'

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By MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chancellor Harvey Perlman was hoping for a diversity plan, a faculty- and student-generated statement on how UNL could best recruit and retain women and minorities.

What he got was a report largely written by a pair of faculty accusing UNL of violating Board of Regents bylaws by making more than 20 percent of its faculty hires from 1998 to 2004 without competitive searches with the goal of boosting its racial and gender mix.

During that time, according to the report, UNL made 61 of its 301 faculty hires without announcing and advertising its open positions.

Of those 61 hires, all but 16 were women or racial minorities, says the report, dated Feb. 29.

The faculty who wrote the report — David Moshman, an educational psychology professor, and Dwayne Ball, an associate professor of marketing — call such hiring practices, commonly known as “opportunity hiring,” inconsistent with regents bylaws forbidding race- and gender-based discrimination.

“I can’t see any way you could reconcile what actually goes on with opportunity hires with regents bylaws,” Moshman said. “I don’t see how the university could defend that.”

The university says its hires are perfectly compatible with regents policies, which prohibit discrimination but also encourage affirmative action in some cases to increase the number of women and minorities in fields in which they are underrepresented.

The Legislature, in fact, provided state money to NU to increase diversity after it mandated in 1997 that the university reach the midpoint of its peer institutions in employment of women and minority faculty or risk losing funding, said Linda Crump, assistant to the chancellor for equity, access and diversity programs at UNL.

Opportunity hires rose in the years after that mandate, Crump said, but they’ve since slowed dramatically.

In the 2006-2007 year, for example, just two faculty came to UNL without competitive searches, Crump said.

Many opportunity hires aren’t even related to race or gender, she said. The university sometimes has to act quickly to hire a research faculty member before grant money runs out and can’t waste time on a search, for example.

Further, she said, non-competitive hires only happen with the support of the faculty in a given department.

“If the faculty want to do a full search, guess what, we’re doing a full search,” she said. “And the bottom line is, if you’re not a stellar candidate, you’re not going to talk to us.

“Race or gender is never the sole factor (in a hire). We follow the law.”

Regents Chairman Chuck Hassebrook of Lyons hasn’t seen Moshman’s and Ball’s report, but said opportunity hires are appropriate in rare cases.

“They have a place,” Hassebrook said.

Perlman is disappointed in the report, Crump said. She questioned whether the report reflects the views of most faculty.

Crump, in fact, was one of the original members of the faculty senate’s diversity committee, appointed about a year ago to draft goals for diversity at UNL.

She resigned after a few meetings, citing time conflicts.

In all, five of eight committee members stepped down, some saying they didn’t want to be part of a report that criticized opportunity hiring instead of stating specific goals related to diversity.

That left Moshman, Ball and a UNL senior to endorse the document.

The report already has generated unrest among senior faculty senate members and is likely to face more dissent when the full senate discusses it next month, said president Steve Bradford.

“It’s not what I expected,” said Bradford, a law professor. “Harvey (Perlman) is clearly disappointed. The executive committee is not happy with the report. I believe there will be substantial discussion.”

Moshman, meanwhile, said he has no objection to rare opportunity hires.

Should a Nobel Prize winner move to Lincoln and seek a job at UNL, for example, there’s no need for the university to conduct a search before snapping that person up, he said.

But prioritizing racial and gender diversity is wrong, he said.

After all, UNL has low numbers of Republicans, too. But Moshman has never heard of an opportunity hire based on political diversity.

“The university gets really concerned with counting how many women and minorities there are,” he said. “Well, the underrepresentation of Republicans is at least as serious as the underrepresentation of women and minorities. But nobody would even talk about a special hire to get a Republican. Nobody would even dream about it.”

Reach Melissa Lee at 473-2682 or mlee@journalstar.com.