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Academic Affairs > Faculty Affairs > Brown Bag Series Four New Brown Bag Series Begin This fall, the Office of Faculty Affairs begins four new series of Brown Bag Workshops designed to help faculty across the UIC campus navigate the sometimes murky waters of teaching, research, and service. Each series will target a specific audience: assistant professors, those at mid-career, those from underrepresented groups, and department heads. But they all share the same goal: to bring faculty members together in an informal setting that lets them discuss the challenges and rewards they face each day. Check back here or watch your emailbox for more information, or contact Laura Stempel at lstempel@uic.edu. Juan-Carlos Campuzano, Director of UIC's Underrepresented Faculty Mentoring Program UICs Underrepresented Faculty Mentoring Program (UFMP) began in January, 2004, as a faculty-driven initiative to address poor retention among Black tenure-track faculty. It was expanded in 2005 to include Latino/a tenure-track faculty, with funding support from the Office of the Provost. Latino/a and African American faculty from at least 28 departments have already participated in the program, both as mentors and as those receiving mentoring, and they have described the experience as enormously helpful in both tangible and intangible ways. While all faculty can benefit from mentoring and networking, those from underrepresented groups face unique challenges as they work to establish themselves as teachers, researchers and strong members of the university community. Such challenges have made it difficult for UIC to recruit and retain many excellent faculty members and to develop and maintain a faculty that is as diverse as the city around us. This is a loss for everyone--for students, faculty, staff and administrators, and for Chicago itself. Now, after two highly successful years under the aegis of the Department of African American Studies and the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Blacks, the program is being adopted by the UIC Office of Faculty Affairs. The UFMP will continue to serve faculty from underrepresented groups, with a special focus on junior faculty who are learning to navigate UIC and to develop a strong support network. The workshop held on April 11, 2007 was a discussion featuring Professors Phil Bowman (African-American Studies/Institute for Research on Race & Public Policy) and Ralph Cintron (English) on the topic of the "structures of knowledge" and the intellectual framework within which we work and talk about diversity. Those of you who attended the Chancellor's and Provost's January 31, 2007 meeting with underrepresented faculty will recall Professor Cintron's comments on the importance of questioning what does and does not count as knowledge, who is allowed to define it, and the ways that race and class structure it at a deep level. The presentations and discussion focused on these and other issues of importance to all who are concerned about diversity within the university Listen
to the MP3 audio file of this workshop
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