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249 In  a diverse group of motivated faculty members conceived an initiative that would yield sustainable, lasting change in the area of diversity at Columbia University. Their work led to the creation of a vice-provostial position dedicated to diversifying the university’s faculty and administration and heralded an unprecedented period of cultural change within the institution. Supported by an initial $,, commitment, the initiative has stimulated innovation across the College of Arts and Sciences and the university’s professional schools and has mushroomed to involve change agents within the faculty, the student body, and the academic and administrative staff. In this chapter we will briefly outline the origins and history of this mobilization effort and, more importantly, will attempt to outline the theory of institutional change that continues to guide the effort. While the initiative’s successes have been due to many factors, including the canny deployment of data, the cultivation of a strong leadership network, and an orientation toward concrete program building, they have above all depended on finding how to implement faculty ideas and mobilize faculty energies in ways that have the greatest impact on key decision makers within the university—chairs, deans, vice presidents, the provost, and the president. In short, this is a story about how faculty mobilization , a source of power in itself, can be effectively linked to other sites of power within the institution to promote progressive change. The authors undertook the writing of this chapter as part of a broader effort to build self-reflection into the diversity initiative. Two of the four writers—Jean E. Howard and Susan Sturm—have been important architects of the Columbia diversity initiative. Much of the history described here involves 12 Linking Mobilization to Institutional Power The Faculty-Led Diversity Initiative at Columbia University EMMA FREUDENBERGER, JEAN E. HOWARD, EDDIE JAUREGUI, AND SUSAN STURM their own efforts, and they cannot claim to be impartial observers. In an effort to introduce a critical lens on the initiative, however, two other researchers have been engaged in the process of documenting and analyzing the diversity initiative. Eddie Jauregui and Emma Freudenberger, law students enrolled in a field research seminar who were not involved in the work of the initiative, joined the study team and reviewed the extensive documentary record of meetings , reports, and email exchanges concerning the initiative. They also interviewed many of the major players who have been involved in the initiative and played an important role in narrating the story, validating or refuting Jean Howard and Susan Sturm’s interpretation of events and framing the analysis. Origins In  the core group of faculty leaders spearheaded a mobilization effort; the effort emerged in part through a sense of urgency about the lack of diversity in key parts of the university and in part from analyzing the limits of previous reform efforts. The two senior faculty members who convened the group— Susan Sturm from the law school as cochair and Alice Kessler-Harris from the history department as its most senior faculty member—had been involved in the University Senate’s Commission on the Status of Women, which in  produced an important report, “The Advancement of Women through the Academic Ranks of the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: Where are the Leaks in the Pipeline?” (familiarly known as “The Pipeline Report”). The data in this report revealed that except in a few places in the humanities, women and faculty members from underrepresented minorities were not present on the faculty in numbers commensurate with their availability in the key pools from which Columbia hires. In addition, the overwhelming majority of external senior hires without competitive searches (target-of-opportunity appointments) went to men. For example, in the decade covered by the  Pipeline Report, eleven of eleven target-of-opportunity hires in natural science departments had been filled by male scholars. In an institution heavily dependent on renewing the faculty through senior appointments , this fact showed why the process of demographic change had been slow. When the Commission attempted to use the report to promote institutional change, however, Commission members found few institutional leaders ready to address its challenges. While the Commission could usefully pinpoint problems, it was not positioned to transform information into action. It became clear to Professors Sturm and Kessler-Harris that data alone was insufficient to generate an institutional commitment to changing race and gender demographics at Columbia. Consequently, they convened a working group of influential faculty members with a track record of commitment to...

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