Proof of Concept at the University of California

With the highest state population of Hispanic residents and the highest state population of Asian American and Pacific Islander residents in the United States, California is among the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country. The non-Hispanic white population has fallen to almost a third of all state residents—yet these population shifts are not reflected in the makeup of faculty at the University of California system. 

Across colleges and universities, a lack of representation in faculty stems in large part from barriers to opportunity at the earliest part of the academic career pipeline: promising graduate students from diverse backgrounds often don’t have or receive the support or resources they need to stay in academia long enough to become tenured professors, chairs, deans, provosts, and presidents. To address this challenge, UC administrators are actively working to hire incoming faculty across disciplines that better reflect California and its people.

The initiative is known as the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). It dates back to 1984, when a small cohort of scholars of color was selected for a new program that offered financial support, mentorship, and opportunities for networking with other scholars from underrepresented backgrounds. Today, PPFP builds on that model. Fellows selected by the program can be of any race, ethnicity, or gender, and demonstrate work that contributes to diversity and equal opportunity at UC.

Annually, about thirty fellowships are awarded, providing a salary, support for research, and professional development, as well as a health benefits package that includes paid sick and family leave. This combined set of offerings provides a foundation for outstanding scholars who may otherwise need to put their work on the back burner for life or financial reasons. In turn, UC cultivates a pool of scholars who are poised to pursue academic careers at schools within the system, and whose talent, work, and backgrounds clearly reflect the now and future of learners.

Two of the postdocs who were involved in PPFP early on were Mark A. Lawson and Douglas Haynes. Both went on to become professors and high-ranking UC administrators: Lawson is now the director of the PPFP program at the UC Office of the President, and he works closely with Haynes, who is the vice provost for academic personnel and programs and professor of modern European history and African American Studies.  

“We’re establishing the cultural practice in the institution of how to be mindful of who you’re hiring and why you’re hiring,” says Lawson, who is also a professor of OB/GYN and reproductive sciences at UC San Diego. “These are really outstanding scholars who bring in additional expertise, community awareness, understanding of their role as academics, and excellence to the faculty.”  

Through its almost forty-year history, the program has adapted to the changing landscape. In 1996, California passed Proposition 209, which prohibits the explicit consideration of race, gender, or national origin in hiring and admissions decisions at public entities like UC. The legislation initially seemed poised to stop PPFP in its tracks. Nonetheless, it continues to draw broad interest from applicants and to meet the same objective of fuller representation in faculty.  

Out of nearly one thousand applicants each year, PPFP fellows are selected for their strong research agendas and demonstrated commitment to community engagement, qualifications that continue to yield a group of postdoctoral fellows that together represents a greater breath of disciplines and areas of research. 

In 2021, Mellon provided a $15 million grant to grow the number of humanities fellows supported by PPFP. In addition to funding the postdocs themselves, the grant goes one step further: it also incentivizes six smaller UC schools—Davis, Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz—to hire PPFP fellows into tenure-track faculty positions by providing salary support and other resources to help growing UC branches compete for top academic talent. To date, Lawson says, Mellon’s grant has supported the hiring of fifteen new faculty in tenure-track positions in the humanities. With secured bridge funding for their first years of employment, PPFP fellows-turned-faculty can pursue ambitious research and areas of study that, in turn, strengthen the offerings of these UC branches.

“By providing these valuable dollars that invest in early-career scholars, we are lowering the risk of engaging in transformational research about the human condition,” says Haynes. “PPFP really is a very powerful engine for transforming the professoriate of the future.” 

In 2023, more than forty PPFP scholars are supported by Mellon, including José Manuel Santillana Blanco, a Queer Xicanx Feminist scholar and storyteller who is the son of Mexican immigrant parents. His in-progress book, Radical Motherhood Ecologies, examines the role that local environmental histories play in shaping ecologies, with a focus on how motherhood can be a mobilizing force to address and disrupt structural violence in communities. It’s complex topic, to be sure.

“I have been able to further develop my research at the crossroads of environmental justice studies critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and geography,” Blanco says of his postdoc at UC Davis. “It has been particularly exciting for me to connect with other scholars of color within the program who have the same passion, commitment, and investment in communities affected by racial and ecological violence.”

Similarly, Jorge Omar Ramírez Pimienta said his PPFP experience, also at UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, was “life changing.” Pimienta’s exploration of Tijuana–San Diego artistic production examines cultural citizenship, with research encompassing visual art, poetry, and scholarship. In 2023, he was an assistant professor in the Spanish and Portuguese department at UC Santa Barbara. 

“PPFP not only has given me time to focus on my research, but also has illustrated how to navigate the job market, understand hiring processes, and even perform self-care during this transition from graduate student to academic,” says Pimienta.  

For those who are hiring for academic positions at UC, PPFP has proved just as valuable—especially for finding early-career faculty who view their university duties through an intersectional-justice lens.

“PPFP is a jewel in the crown of the UC system and a model across the nation for achieving inclusive excellence in faculty recruitment,” says Charles Hale, SAGE Sara Miller McCune dean of social sciences and professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. “We have recruited PPFP scholars with the knowledge that [the program’s] rigorous selection process translates into an exceptionally high rate of success in their subsequent career paths.” 

One example is Mae Miller-Likhethe, who was accepted into PPFP as a geography postdoc at UC Berkeley during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her scholarship and curatorial work is at the intersection of oceanic humanities, the global Black radical tradition, and cultural histories of infrastructure and empire. The resources offered through PPFP helped Miller-Likhethe shape her work during an otherwise stressful time.

“On a basic level, the postdoc provided relative financial security and the flexibility to prioritize my physical and mental health amidst the pandemic and global economic crisis,” she says. “Within that space, I was able to think carefully about how to revise some of the arguments from my dissertation for my ongoing book project while also exploring new creative directions with online exhibition curation and interdisciplinary arts education.” 

In 2023, Miller-Likhethe is a tenure-track professor in global studies at UC Santa Barbara. 

Overall, Haynes and Lawson say that PPFP’s decades-long survival makes it a valuable model for other universities that are now trying to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives following the 2023 US Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action.  

“Some studies have suggested that [without intervention] UC faculty wouldn’t look like the population of California until sometime around 2080,” says Lawson. “But with PPFP in place, that is shortening considerably. We’re hoping for 2040.”