AAAS will conduct a one-year project that builds on over five years of work exploring how federal and state law and policy impact the operation of programs designed to support underrepresented faculty and students on university campuses.
Intellectual Merit. Having undertaken the work of identifying worthy and legally defensible initiatives, there is additional intrinsic intellectual merit in making this guidance relevant to a broader array of institutions and situations where legal precedent may apply differently. AAAS will reach various segments of higher education through two workshops?in partnership with five endorsing higher education organizations. These technical assistance workshops will bridge federal law to institutional practice for general counsels, academic leaders, and program administrators.
Broader Impacts. The project focus is how to strengthen the U.S. STEM work force by increasing participation by disadvantaged and underrepresented groups in STEM education and careers. Different bodies of law apply to faculty search, hiring, and advancement (in the workplace) and to student access, support, and success. The project addresses both, with real examples of programs and practices that are research and evaluation-based. Supplementary materials on, e.g., community colleges plus in-depth legal analysis and program guidelines created in the previous phase of the project, will also be produced. The NSF performer community, and higher education institutions more generally, are the targeted audience for these media.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) led a law and diversity project, with participation by the Association of American Universities (AAU), funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. This project provided in-depth policy and legal resources to institutional leaders and their counsel to help them succeed in meeting Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-related 21st Century educational goals. The project initially focused on STEM fields, with the first workshop for 10 AAU member institutions. Day one was designed for university General Counsels. From a sophisticated and detailed legal perspective, legally sustainable approaches to building greater faculty diversity, as well as graduate and undergraduate student body diversity were explored and valued approaches that pose greater legal challenges were discussed. Recent cases, such as Fisher v. University of Texas, as well as older cases, long-standing statutes and enforcement practices, and areas where the law is less clear, were also discussed. The second day of the workshop provided an opportunity for General Counsels and Provosts, or at least one senior academic colleague, from each participating institution to reach a common understanding of the parameters for both the effectiveness and the legal sustainability of diversity programs. In 2011, two, 2-day national workshops were held at Rice University and Boston University. National experts on law and policy provided college and university legal counsel with comprehensive and in-depth information on (a) the different statutory regimes, cases, and legal rationales, as well as voter-initiative-generated state laws, governing faculty and student diversity and access programs and practices on campus; (b) the key legal issues implicated when designing and implementing programs and practices to increase faculty and student access and diversity in science and technology fields, as well as other disciplines, including the toughest legal issues; (c) good strategies for resolving the legal issues without undermining the effectiveness of programs. In November 2012, the materials developed from the national workshops over the course of the project were adapted to cover all disciplines and to fit other university settings for nation-wide distribution. The following resources, as well as a variety of slide sets and other reports not listed below, were created as part of the project and are available for free downloading at www.aaascapacity.org/. They may be copied and adapted for internal use by public and tax-exempt private institutions of higher education. Several blog posts derived from project materials and authored by Daryl Chubin are also available at AAAS MemberCentral (http://membercentral.aaas.org/). I. Summary and Highlights Of The Handbook On Diversity And The Law: Navigating A Complex Landscape To Foster Greater Faculty and Student Diversity in Higher Education, Second Edition, With Supplementary Guidance Based on New Federal Cases and New Resources (AAAS and EducationCounsel, 2012). The Handbook provides extensive legal and policy resources for academic and legal leaders of institutions of higher education, to help them collaborate to improve access and broaden the diversity of their faculties and student bodies, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (but also in other fields). II. Beyond Federal Law: Trends and Principles Associated with State Laws Banning the Consideration of Race, Ethnicity, and Sex Among Public Education Institutions (AAAS and EducationCounsel, 2012) When higher education leaders address issues of access and diversity in higher education, they are inevitably confronted with questions of law, just as they address questions of educational soundness as a matter of policy and program development. With the objective of providing some clear and important guidelines with respect to key legal issues, which should inform that policy and program development, this paper addresses significant state law (and related federal court) developments over the course of the past fifteen years on the topic of race-, ethnicity- and sex-related preferences among public education institutions. This guidance provides a framework for assessing access- and diversity-related policies and programs at public colleges and universities in light of these state developments. III. The Smart Grid for Institutions of Higher Education and The Students They Serve, Developing and Using Collaborative Agreements to Bring More Students into STEM (AAAS and EducationCounsel, 2012) This paper centers on the promise of change that can be advanced by institutional efforts to develop new collaborative relationships tailored to specific institutional needs, student needs, and STEM field needs. With such a focus, colleges and universities can systematically expand sustainable opportunities for student transition, with corresponding exchanges of resources and the introduction of new talent to existing programs. While each institution must identify its own goals for an educational collaboration in STEM fields, a legally sustainable objective of these collaborations for many institutions is to increase the participation in STEM higher education of students of all races, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds beyond what other means have made possible. For detailed information, visit http://php.aaas.org/programs/centers/capacity/07_Engagement/07_Beyond-SOG.php.
