SU Faculty Data Initiative

As a private institution, Seattle University has not historically collected or made public comprehensive data on faculty demographics, salaries, positions and time in rank. The SU Office of Institutional Research provides aggregated information on faculty and staff. However, these data are not detailed enough to discern very much about campus climate and culture and their effects on tenure and promotion experiences. This in turn makes it difficult to identify and address equity and diversity issues affecting SU faculty. 
 
We offer a brief overview of some of the faculty data SU ADVANCE had collected and analyzed as of 2020. Most of this work was done by SU ADVANCE team member, Dr. Donna Sylvester. 
 
First, we show a breakdown of the gendered and racial composition of tenured or tenure-track SU faculty across the institution. A few issues complicate these data snapshots.  First, it only became possible for SU faculty to list gender as an "unreported category" in 2019, as prior to that, faculty had to pick either "male" or "female." Second, this analysis was complicated by the fact that race is not known for a large percentage of our faculty. This is thought to be a result of both gaps in the method of collecting this data point and also with the categories themselves (which are based on the admittedly problematic US census categories). “Under-Represented Minority” or URM as it is used here is a meta-category that includes Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander categories. “All Diversity” as a meta-category includes faculty who identify as URM or as Asian and excludes faculty who identify as White or Unknown.

Because of the focus of SU ADVANCE on the effects that gender and certain types of administrative service have on patterns of promotion, we also include the following comparison of tenured and tenure track faculty by rank and gender as of 2020.