Four HFA Faculty Selected for 2024-25 STRIDE Faculty Fellowship Cohort
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Four HFA faculty members were selected as part of the Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity Excellence (STRIDE) Faculty Fellowship Program for the 2024-25 academic year: María Barbón, professor, comparative literature; Michael Becker, associate professor, linguistics; Jonathan Hulting-Cohen, associate professor, music and dance; and Joshua Michal, associate professor, music and dance.
The STRIDE program aims to advance faculty diversity, equity and inclusive excellence in faculty recruitment at UMass Amherst and the fellowship program provides training for committee members involved in the recruitment and evaluation of candidates for faculty and librarian positions on campus. The fellows facilitate STRIDE Faculty Recruitment Workshops, ensuring that they are faculty-centered and faculty-driven.
Fellows serve a one-year appointment with the expectation of continued engagement in improving training materials and answering pertinent questions raised by individual faculty members or a search committee.
A subset of this year’s fellows will also be specifically trained to administer a new workshop, Strategies and Tactics for Retention through Inclusive Promotion Evaluation (STRIPE) training, for personnel committee members who volunteer to learn strategies to minimize bias in faculty promotion and tenure cases. The STRIDE and STRIPE training mechanisms are important tools in our ongoing efforts to address institutional bias in hiring and increase retention.
The STRIDE fellowship program is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Office of Equity and Inclusion and complements other efforts to support faculty diversity, harnessing the collective knowledge and experience of university faculty to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in recruitment and retention.