Diversity: Faculty and other academic personnel
UCSB Benjamin Banneker Fellows Coordinated Hiring Initiative (Banneker Initiative)
UC Santa Barbara, 2023-2024
Project Principal Investigators
Jeffrey Stewart, Vice Chancellor, Diversity Equity, and Inclusion
Project Abstract
Individual STEM departments at USCB face challenges in recruiting and retaining Underrepresented (UR) faculty members, with very low numbers of Black, Latina/o/x, and Indigenous professors and lecturers. This is in contrast to high numbers of UR students who enroll at UCSB with aspirations to achieve STEM degrees. To address this challenge, UCSB proposes a multidisciplinary coordinated hiring initiative to hire and retain faculty whose presence on campus will advance research in science and engineering and advance racial justice. Called the Benjamin Banneker Initiative, the program invokes the model of an eighteenth century Black natural scientist, mathematician, astronomer, and racial justice advocate to create a community of innovative faculty in STEM to advance new models of diversity and racial justice. Coordinated hiring efforts, along with other inclusive recruitment strategies, are known to result in higher numbers of UR applicants and eventual hires in STEM.