Call for Letters of Intent: 2023-2024 Advancing Faculty Diversity Program

Dear Colleagues,

The UC Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs has announced this year’s Request for Proposals (RFP) process for the 2023-2024 Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) Program. Now in its eighth year, there will be over $2.5 million available for this year’s competition.

Each campus may submit up to two proposals for each program track:

The AFD Recruitment Program, which supports efforts on campuses to develop recruitment processes that are predicted to result in more diverse faculty hiring (up to $500,000 over two years for projects focused on recruitments and up to $150,000 over two years for projects focused on improving the recruitment process); and
The AFD Improved Climate and Retention Program, which supports efforts to develop equity-oriented interventions, data leadership, and research to improve workplace climate and retention outcomes (up to $175,000 for single-campus proposals or up to $250,000 for multi-campus proposals over three years).

The RFP identified the following priorities and guidelines:

All units are asked to be responsive to how the COVID-19 pandemic may have altered the recruitment and retention landscape, including how the pandemic may have exacerbated existing inequities for minoritized faculty.
UCOP will prioritize proposals that include multi-campus collaborations.
For proposals focused on recruitments for 2023-24 and 2024-25, the number of hires should be large enough that the interventions will have a notable effect on the composition of the hiring unit(s).
For proposals focused on improving the recruitment process, research-based and imaginative ideas that build new recruitment protocols are encouraged.
For proposals focused on retention and climate improvement, projects aimed at responding to COVID-19 issues that have affected faculty and projects addressing issues of racial justice through proposed interventions are especially encouraged.
All units should consider building on the innovative and successful pilot projects funded in years 1-7 of this program and summarized in the Appendices of the two RFPs. A variety of funding mechanisms are available within each type of grant for replication or research-only projects (both single- and multi-campus) with a limited total budget. See the RFPs for details.

Executive Vice Chancellor Simmons and Vice Chancellor Petitt will carefully consider all ideas and select up to two proposals per track to advance based on the following criteria:

Readiness to undertake interventions to enhance opportunities to hire more diverse faculty (as evidenced by current efforts);
Demonstrated need for improvement balanced with the likelihood of achieving results; and
Alignment with institutional goals and priorities.

Recruitment Proposals: Due to significant and ongoing FTE commitments to the three prior AFD cluster hire initiatives at UC San Diego, any new FTE commitments for all recruitment proposals must be provided by the cognizant deans.

Climate and Retention Proposals: We are interested in ideas that are responsive to the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on minoritized faculty. We also encourage units to incorporate the findings of the 2020 Academics@UCSD Survey and promising practices identified by the Senate-Administration Workgroups on Holistic Teaching Evaluation, Faculty Workload, and Faculty Recruitment.

Final proposals are due to UCOP on May 26, 2023. If you would like to be considered for one or both tracks, we ask that you send a one-page letter of intent (LOI) per proposal no later than April 26. We ask that you seek the endorsement of involved unit leaders (including FTE commitment of involved deans if submitting for the recruitment track) prior to submitting an LOI. We will notify applicants by May 4 if your unit(s) have been selected to submit a proposal.

UCOP will be hosting two pre-award online forums for those interested in developing a project proposal, one on April 14, 2023, from 1 to 2 pm and one on April 19, 2023, from 11 a.m. to Noon. Those interested in attending may RSVP at Patricia.Osorio-Odea@ucop.edu. These forums will be used to address questions from potential applicants and to bring possible collaborators together. Attendance is not required to submit a proposal.

Please send letters of intent by April 26, 2023 to vcedi-faculty@ucsd.edu and indicate whether you are interested in submitting for the Recruitment track, the Improved Climate and Retention track, or both. See attached RFPs for the full criteria and further details.

Elizabeth H. Simmons
Executive Vice Chancellor

Becky R. Petitt
Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Victor Ferreira
Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Professor of Psychology