The University of Oklahoma (OU) runs an ADVANCE PAID project tailored to the central states. The centerpiece of the activity is a biennial Big XII Workshop on Faculty Recruitment, Retention and Leadership. As a member of the Big XII Conference of Institutions of Higher Education, OU will invite each Big XII school (Baylor, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech) to the new event in 2007, asking them to bring a team to OU to work on faculty recruitment, retention and leadership for their campus. Teams will be required to include administrators and STEM as well as Social Sciences faculty. The second workshop in Year 4, in the fall of 2009, will showcase the fruits of these teams' labors and reinforce the collaboration between the Big XII schools to address the issues of faculty recruitment, retention and leadership with a specific focus on the advancement of STEM women in academia.
The workshop activities will be centered on diversifying the faculty and building teams and strategies to promote members of underrepresented groups in the faculty and to positions of leadership. The special focus is on women in STEM disciplines, but the activities benefit all disciplines of these comprehensive universities. The workshop will make use of the best practices culled from current NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) programs, in particular those that have worked well at large public institutions with strong faculty governance. The workshops will dovetail with the adaptation and implementation of practices at OU to promote women in STEM disciplines, to help them succeed in academia and to move into positions of leadership.
The Intellectual Merit of the project is rapid dissemination and adaptation of best practices of the existing ADVANCE IT projects to twelve institutions in the central states, including three EPSCoR states, through two proposed Big XII workshops and through tailored programs on the OU campus for institutional change in advancing STEM women faculty in academia.
The Broader Impacts of the project include 1) a broadening of ethnic minorities involved in STEM academic endeavors, 2) outreach to women undergraduate and graduate students at all institutions of higher education in Oklahoma through the annual Women in Science Conference held at Langston University (a HBCU), 3) collaboration with government agencies in the region in diversity efforts and 4) outreach to Native American populations, specifically the Chickasaw Nation and the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.
