Current diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in engineering colleges largely focus on systemic changes to improve the recruitment of women of Black, Hispanic, and Native American ethnic backgrounds and the retention of all women. Numerous funding agencies offer grants to fund research and initiatives to improve the representation of historically underrepresented backgrounds in the engineering professoriate. Previous research has identified the importance of having faculty recruitment and retention data available to make data-informed decisions regarding DEI initiatives. Thus, four campuses within a large public university system applied for and were awarded an NSF ADVANCE Partnership grant, including developing a system-wide secured dashboard pairing faculty demographic data (primarily gender, ethnicity, and country of undergraduate education) with hiring, retention, and promotion data to identify any areas of concern and better inform future DEI initiatives. The grant further proposed to use the dashboards to inform the implementation of the Aspire IChange program, an NSF INCLUDES funded program that uses a data-driven self-assessment to identify inequities in faculty recruitment, retention, and advancement, and to realize systemic change within engineering colleges in the university system. This paper discusses the challenges faced in implementing this multi-campus grant as a case study to illustrate the systemic obstacles to achieving systemic change that exist in higher education institutions. Some of these challenges include a lack of strategic clarity on diversifying faculty, frequent changing of administrators, unclear definitions of system-level administration, campus administration, and other grant personnel responsibilities, lack of direct data sharing practices and procedures between universities within the system, inconsistent practices in the handling of faculty data among campuses, and administration of subawards between campuses. Recommendations for implementing future multi-campus initiatives within a university system are presented.
The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025