Staff Equity and Diversity Meeting Minutes, December 5, 2014
Meeting convened at 9:05
In attendance: Deborah Saks, Derrick Wydick, Tom Cappelletti, Irina Marsant, Daniel Styer, Mari Carmen
Garcia, Gayle Pitman, Tim Taylor, and Angie Lambert.
Angie reported that she has met with both the Academic Senate and Marybeth Buechner to discuss the
hiring process questionnaire that has been proposed.
On November 18th, when Angie met with the Senate, they indicated they did not like the phrasing in
question #11: “Can you suggest any improvements in the screening process that would increase the
diversity of our interview pool?” Concerns centered around the fact that the committee would not
actually have any specific information about the diversity of the selected pool, and Senate asked that
the wording of this be changed. Ginni May asked Senators to provide any input about the survey
directly to Angie.
On November 25th at the next meeting of the Senate, no changes had been submitted, and because the
intention was to get Senate support, not approval, the agreement was made that when the
questionnaire is finalized, Angie will go back to Senate to share it as an information item.
It was noted that the District currently reviews all suggested interview pools for diversity and has the
right to go back to the committee and ask them to add more from the pool. In this way, District is
already working to insure diversity of the pool.
There was discussion that cultural competency is a critical issue as well and that it is not the same as
diversity.
The SEDC opted to keep question 11 and add another question with the same wording but which added
the words “cultural competency” in place of “diversity” in the question.
Angie reported that MaryBeth made an overall suggestion to have the questions follow the sequencing
of the hiring process (e.g., questions about advertising before questions about screening, etc.). She did
suggest that it would be possible to put some questions at the end as “suggestions for improvement.”
On question #2, it was decided to change the word “hiring” to interview and to remove the word “best.”
MaryBeth had also suggested to Angie that the bold and underlining in the questions be removed so as
not to point respondents in a particular direction. Tom suggested using italics as a way of making it clear
something was important without having the persuasive properties of bold font.
Question #6 was discussed, but it was decided that leaving it vague was purposeful, so it was not
changed.
Question #10 about advertising led to discussion that many committee members may not know where a
position was advertised, so it was suggested that a question be added before #10 to ask, “Do you know
where this position was advertised?”
Because the topic of advertising deserves a robust conversation, it was suggested that we revisit the
topic at a later meeting.
Gayle provided updates from the LGBTQIA subcommittee. She reported that the campus climate survey
has several hundred responses so far and will be closing soon. She also reported that students now
have the ability in e-services to indicate their preferred names in addition to their legally recognized
name. Gayle also reported that refusing to use a student’s preferred name such that it outed that
student as transgender or gender-nonconforming was a FERPA violation. She will be sharing more about
this with the LGBTQIA subcommittee, and efforts will be made to widely disseminate this information.
Daniel reported that the preferred names will be populated into D2L, but not yet into Socrates, starting
by January, so faculty will have easy access to this information. It was also reported that there has been
some concern about widely publicizing the preferred name option to students because there is concern
that some students will abuse this (e.g., Mickey Mouse).
Meeting adjourned at 9:55.