Who are the speakers?
Deborah J. Burris is the Director of Equal Opportunity and Diversity at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. With nearly 16,000 students, UM-St. Louis is the third largest university in Missouri and the only metropolitan public research university in the St. Louis region. She brings to her position over 30 years of experience working in student development, human resources and equal opportunity.
Ms. Burris earned her undergraduate degree at St. Louis University in Organizational Development, a Chancellor’s Certificate in Human Resource Management from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and a Master of Education, Ed Leadership & Policy Analysis from the University of Missouri.
Ms. Burris is actively involved in professional and community service. She is second vice president of the American Association for Affirmative Action (AAAA) and served as the conference chair for the 2005 AAAA National Conference and was the co-chair for the 2009 AAAA conference. She also serves on the Community Partnership Advisory Board of the St. Louis Symphony. Additionally, she is active in her church where she serves as co-youth director, teacher, and evangelist minister.
Martha S. West, Professor of Law Emeritus, taught employment law for twenty-five years at the University of California Davis School of Law, retiring in 2007. She is currently General Counsel for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), headquartered in Washington, D.C. She continues to teach “Gender and Law” one quarter a year to undergraduates in the UC Davis Women’s Studies program.
Professor West received her BA in history, magna cum laude, from Brandeis University in 1967, and her JD, summa cum laude, from Indiana University-Bloomington, School of Law, in 1974. After eight years of law practice in Indianapolis, Indiana, she began teaching at UC Davis in 1982. She served as associate dean of the Law School from 1988-92.
Her academic research has focused on discrimination against women faculty in higher education. She has also published articles on the history of affirmative action and the struggles for equitable funding of public schools. She is co-author of a law school textbook, Sex-Based Discrimination (6th ed.2006), with Prof. Herma Hill Kay, UC Berkeley.
Beginning in 2001, Professor West and colleagues at UC Davis organized three years of hearings in the California state legislature, coordinated by State Senator Jackie Speier, to investigate the drastic decline in women faculty hires within the UC system after the UC Regents abolished affirmative action in 1995 and California voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996. Professor West’s report, “Unprecedented Urgency: Gender Discrimination in Faculty Hiring at the University of California,” describing these organizing efforts, now appears in edited form as a chapter in the recent book, Doing Diversity in Higher Education (Winnifred Brown-Glaude, ed. 2009).
In 2006, while on sabbatical at the American Association of University Professors in Washington, D.C., Professor West co-authored the text introducing the AAUP’s statistical portrait of women faculty at over 1400 colleges and universities in the United States, AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006 (AAUP 2006)(M.S. West and John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy at AAUP).
Professor West served eight years as a member of the Davis public school board from 1997 through 2005. During those years, she coordinated two school parcel tax campaigns and one facilities bond campaign, each one receiving over 80% “yes” votes. As a result of the successful bond campaign, the school district built a new junior high school and two elementary schools. Professor West has three daughters and three grandchildren.
