Harvey Brody
By
Shipra Shukla
Professor Emeritus Harvey Brody, DDS, hasn't let his recent retirement stand in the way of making progress toward his longtime goal of advancing diversity at UCSF.
The 1963 graduate of the UCSF School of Dentistry is now part of the planning committee for an upcoming diversity celebration this fall. Brody is also serving on search committees for the UCSF School of Nursing, where he continues to work for a more diverse faculty.
Before retiring in June, Brody was instrumental in launching UCSF's 10-point initiative to promote diversity. The initiative calls for achieving key milestones, such as improving diversity in faculty hiring, this year.
"While department chairs believed in and wanted diversity, there was a myth that prevailed - the myth that there just wasn't a qualified pool of diverse applicants out there," Brody says. "I wanted to show, through data, that there was."
Brody has made pioneering efforts throughout his career in promoting diversity at all levels in our society. His career includes establishing community-based health and education projects at Mount Zion, serving in a policy analyst position under Senator Dianne Feinstein in Washington, DC, and establishing the Post-Baccalaureate Program for the UCSF School of Dentistry, which is considered a national outreach model for targeting students from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds to gain entry into dental school. Brody helped establish the program in 1997 and served as assistant director for five years.
The UCSF School of Medicine used the program as a model to set up its own Post-Baccalaureate Program. Funded by the California Endowment, the program recognized that there was a lack of diversity in professional schools and an uneven distribution of health providers in underserved communities.
Attracting Qualified Candidates
Most recently, in 2004, Brody was appointed to lead UCSF's first-ever Faculty Search Ambassador Program, which was created by Chancellor Mike Bishop, MD, to assist search committees in attracting diverse pools of qualified faculty candidates.
Specifically, the role of the faculty search ambassador was to advise search committee chairs on strategies to enhance the applicant pool of women and minorities. The program sought to affect institutional factors by setting up systems to create greater diversity among UCSF faculty.
In conducting initial assessments, which included outreach and collaboration with department chairs, Brody discovered that searches for faculty positions relied on established assumptions about the applicant pool.
In attending national meetings of minority professional organizations - including the American Medical Women's Association, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association and the National Medical Association, among others - Brody discovered that UCSF did not have a presence at these meetings and did not make outreach efforts to its members during an open search period. While Brody met many qualified potential applicants, he found the perception among them was apathy on the part of UCSF.
"There was a sense that UCSF was not interested in recruiting from their group," Brody says. "We wanted to figure out a way to capture data about the qualified potential candidates we were meeting." And thus, the idea of a Traveling Ambassador was born.
For Brody, the ambassadorship was a perfect fit, capping a long UCSF career that began when he joined the faculty as an assistant professor of oral biology in the School of Dentistry and as assistant professor of community medicine in the School of Medicine in 1965.
Brody says the program proved successful. Out of 32 filled positions as of May 2005, the search chair or committee had met with him regarding eight positions. Of the eight, three of the positions, or 38 percent, were filled by underrepresented minorities. In contrast, search chairs or committees that had not met with Brody filled one of the 24 positions, or 4 percent, with underrepresented minorities, he explains.
Michael Adams, director of the UCSF Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, and Diversity, sums up Brody's work this way: "Harvey knows who he is and never tries to represent minorities, but rather tries to work on the barriers, both apparent and hidden, that impede the changes that need to occur. Since the formal transition from the ambassador program to other initiatives, Harvey continues his commitment by making himself available to campus associates with whom he has worked. I count him among the most positive influences for change at UCSF in recent times. It was neither accident nor surprise that he was awarded the prestigious UCSF Dr. Martin Luther King Award in 2006."
Ensuring Best Practices
UCSF has long sought to attract the best and most diverse candidates among faculty, staff, students and trainees. In fact, not only does the UCSF Diversity Initiative call for establishing a program of best practices for faculty and staff recruitment and retention, the UCSF Strategic Plan, unveiled in June, makes nurturing diversity and creating a diverse campus community major priorities. Read the entire strategic plan
here.
Recently, Brody revealed his recommendations for best practices, which are based on research of diversity strategies at other academic health institutions, to the Faculty Diversity Initiative Committee at UCSF. That committee has since been named the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Academic Diversity, which is co-chaired by Eugene Washington, MD, executive vice chancellor and provost. The charge to the committee is to identify, implement and evaluate efforts to promote diversity among UCSF faculty, other academic appointees, postdoctoral scholars, clinical fellows, residents and students to monitor progress toward state goals.
Recently appointed director of Academic Diversity, Renee Navarro, PharmD, MD, associate dean for Academic Affairs in the medical school and a member of the committee, says Brody's legacy as a champion of diversity will be lasting.
"Harvey Brody serves as a role model and mentor for me and countless other faculty by his life's work of advocacy and action to achieve the goal of equity," Navarro says. "I will be working to ensure that the University continues to follow best practices for both recruitment and retention. The search ambassador program is continuing with faculty who were trained to speak for the University. They provide information about available positions when they travel to specialty society meetings as well as meetings for faculty in underrepresented groups."
Promoting Accountability
Brody sees incorporating best practices into faculty searches as a way to promote accountability and allow search committees to move from the position of having collective beliefs about diversity to actions that hold individual decisionmakers accountable.
Brody's recommendations for accountability include an annual diversity reporting cycle in which leaders at each level are reviewed on specific factors regarding diversity, and also include incentives that reward diversity activities with enrichment funds.
Brody believes diversity serves the University's larger mission of improving human health around the world. "To me, diversity and excellence are the same side of the coin. There is a richness that comes from a diverse group of faculty. There will be different questions asked regarding scientific research and its impact on health delivery. We can better address health disparities."
Indeed, the Post-Baccalaureate Program is based on the idea that students from underserved communities often go back to, and work in, their communities, thereby serving as role models and addressing the problems of health care disparities and access to care.
Upon retirement, Brody has expanded his volunteer efforts, working with minority boys incarcerated at the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center. Brody has volunteered at that center for the past 12 years, encouraging youths to stay safe, stay free, stay in school and consider a career in a health-related field.
"I've been struck by the discrepancy between what we say about equal opportunity and what we do," Brody says. "That issue - the promise of equal opportunity - has guided my life. That's what this country is supposed to be about. That is my hope for UCSF."
Related Links:
UCSF Unveils Strategic Plan to Guide Its Global Leadership in Advancing HealthUCSF Today, June 28, 2007
UCSF Launches 10-Point Initiative to Promote DiversityUCSF Today, Feb. 28, 2007
