Dear Colleagues,
The UC Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs has announced this year’s Request for Proposals (RFP) process for the 2024-2025 Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) Program. Now in its ninth year, there will be approximately $2.5 million available for awards.
This year, each campus may submit up to two proposals for each program track:
- The AFD Recruitment Program, which focuses on diversifying the ladder-rank faculty by implementing more equitable recruiting processes, seeks proposals that focus on faculty recruitment (up to $500,000 over three years); that incorporate plans for retaining newly hired faculty (up to $550,000); and for the new Inclusive Excellence Endowed Chair ($500,000 in matching funds).
- The AFD Improved Climate and Retention Program, which supports efforts to improve workplace climate and retention outcomes, seeks proposals that deepen campus connections with individual projects through enhanced campus commitments to the projects, and proposals that build on existing campus SEA Change efforts (up to $200,000 for single-campus proposals, up to $275,000 for multi-campus proposals, and up to $75,000 for external grant fundraising projects over three years). These may include pilot projects, scale-up projects, data capacity projects, and research projects.
The RFP identified the following priorities and guidelines:
- This year AFD welcomes proposals that think beyond the recruitment process. As new recruitments are made, proposals that examine and work to address what is required to retain a newly recruited faculty member are encouraged. Building on other successful improved climate and retention practices, in what ways can project leaders build support structures for newly hired faculty to thrive?
- This year AFD is offering a single award for the new Inclusive Excellence Endowed Chair. Proposed chairs are expected to align with the campus or school inclusive excellence initiatives or efforts. These may include outreach and broadening participation, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, augmenting, or supporting campus readiness or leadership as a federally designated Minority Serving Institution.
- For proposals focused on recruitments, the number of hires should be large enough that the interventions will have a notable effect on the composition of the hiring unit(s).
- Funds in the External Grant Fundraising Support category under Retention and Climate Improvement will be available for projects seeking resources to apply for external funding from federal and state agencies, foundations (public and private) and other funding sources, including to continue previously funded successful project interventions.
- All units should consider building on the innovative and successful pilot projects funded in Years 1-8 of this program and summarized in the Appendices of the two RFPs.
- All proposed projects must be compliant with Proposition 209.
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 or retain more diverse faculty (as evidenced by current efforts).
- Demonstrated need for improvement balanced with the likelihood of achieving results.
- 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. We will also consider proposals for an Inclusive Excellence Endowed Chair, provided that it is linked to an ongoing effort to procure donor funds to attain the endowed chair threshold at UC San Diego.
Final proposals are due to UCOP on June 10, 2024. 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 May 13. 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 17 if your unit(s) have been selected to submit a proposal.
Please send letters of intent by May 13 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 the linked RFPs for the full criteria and further details.
