The Nation’s college and university faculties are overwhelmingly—75 percent—White. Even more troubling is that this percentage isn’t changing quickly despite continued calls for more diversity on campuses.
Consider these facts: (1) most university leaders claim that race and racism are not issues on their campuses; and (2) university leaders have invested large amounts of money in faculty diversity in response to calls for more diversity and equity across university constituents. These two facts seem contradictory. If there aren’t issues around race and racism on college campuses, why is there a need to invest so much money to diversify the campus and alleviate inequities?
Scholars who have focused on diversity in faculty hiring for decades—Daryl Smith, for example—tell us that success is rooted in the support of university leadership, beginning with presidents and including provosts and deans. And this support must be buttressed by university boards of trustees, which typically mirror the makeup of faculty: They are overwhelmingly White and male. Without leadership and accountability, it’s nearly impossible to gain momentum toward diversifying the faculty and to bring about a sense of equity on a campus. The first step is that leaders must value diversity, and the second is that they must recognize that there is an inclusion problem and that systemic racism is at the root of this problem.
When I talked with provosts and deans for my book Doing the Right Thing: How to Undo Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring, they would often make excuses for faculty members: “They just don’t know, as diversity is not something they have disciplinary expertise on.” Having interacted with faculties across the nation in all types of colleges and universities, I know two things:
(1) When they want to know about something that is of value to them, they will investigate it, read about it, and develop their skills. (2) They know very little about hiring a diverse faculty and the experiences of faculty of color because they choose not to. I think leaders have allowed faculties to be intellectually passive—even lazy—around issues of racism, equity, and diversity. Yes, faculty roles focus on research, service, and teaching, but issues of diversity, equity, and race permeate all these areas. Even when faculty members don’t conduct research with any connection to race, equity, or diversity, these issues still play a role as to whom they work with, to whom they offer opportunities, and who has the chance to become their colleague.
To ensure that faculty-hiring search committees operate in the most productive and equitable ways possible, academic leaders must use a variety of tactics. In my conversations with leaders who were successful, they discussed strategies ranging from monetary incentives to sitting on hiring committees to using data to sway skeptical faculty members.
A dean at a midwestern research university shared with me that when messages around diversity came from her, things changed. When she came to the university, the school had almost no diversity in the faculty, and she immediately took on the issue and began talking about it, particularly to those in upper-level administration. She made it a priority and pointed out the lack of diversity on a regular basis. As a result, the faculty at her school is now becoming more diverse. For next steps, she will continue to push for more diversity among the faculty,
requiring them to participate in implicit bias training and including these issues in their annual strategic planning retreat.
Similarly, at another university that has experienced much controversy around racial issues, the provost holds deans accountable for faculty diversity in their performance appraisals. He admitted that this was “not the case prior to the national controversies, but it is now vital to ensure that the faculty is diverse.” Both accountability and a commitment to diversity and inclusion are included in the university’s new strategic plan. In addition to holding deans accountable in performance appraisals, the provost also provides funding matches for hiring faculty who can bring diversity to the curriculum, classroom, and faculty overall.
Some leaders are very heavily involved in faculty searches because they feel that they must be to achieve faculty diversity and push back against the status quo. A dean at a midwestern university shared with me that when he gets a list of final candidates that is all White men, he questions it and asks the committee for more information and a justification for the lack of racial and gender diversity. He can get a list like this approved by the provost’s office, but it will take more work and committees must answer a lot of questions: “Have we done our best? Do we have the best candidates? Have we accidentally excluded someone or brushed over someone?” Similarly, a vice provost at a research university in the Northeast told me that the provost’s office will send a list of possible candidates back to the search committee if it is not diverse in terms of race and gender: “We’ll say, maybe you should be keeping the search open longer and try to reach out to more people.”
Some provosts step in to ensure that pipeline issues don’t stand in the way of progress and movement in terms of faculty diversity. For example, a provost in the Northeast explained that once faculty searches begin, he monitors the pools for faculty hires. He and the deans check to see if the demographics of the various faculty search pools match the pool of individuals that exists in higher education overall. In his words, “If we don’t see diversity that reflects the larger pool of candidates—for example, if we see it seems to be heavily leaning toward men or heavily leaning toward Whites, even though there is diversity in the pool—we will then contact [the search committee] and say this is what we’re observing. What’s going on? We will use that to intervene at different times in searches, saying, ‘We see that you have x number of people in the long list that are [from diverse backgrounds]. What’s your plan for really looking at them carefully?’”
Although this approach is labor intensive on the part of the provost’s office, it has a significant impact on faculty hiring, with this Ivy League institution changing its faculty demographics at a faster pace than most other highly selective, research institutions over the past five years. According to the provost, “Our hiring has gone very well since we launched this plan. . .. I have departments that are really actively trying to diversify their faculty.” In most cases, faculties don’t look at pipeline data because they want to reproduce themselves. This provost described the problem using an example from the sciences: “Earth and planetary science is a field that often is very White and very male. [Our department] wanted to hire another planetary scientist and so literally a table full, a group of them, came to visit me, trying to lobby me to allow them to hire. It was [a list of] literally all White guys.
I basically looked at them and maintained, ‘I will not allow you to hire another person like you until you diversify your faculty,’ and lo and behold, [the] next hire is a person of color, a postdoc from MIT. You know, all the right attributes, but they had to get out of their network to do that, and in fact the last two hires have been people of color in that department.” Without a push from the provost, this department would have happily and comfortably reproduced itself without ever seeking out data on the growing diversity in their field.
A strong and consistent message from leadership at all levels is essential to dismantling systemic racism and hiring a diverse faculty. It is important that presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs, and search committee chairs all communicate the same messages about the institution’s commitment to hiring and retaining a diverse faculty, and how this diversity is central to academic excellence.
Institutions have mastered the art of issuing diversity statements on their websites, including a commitment to diversity in their strategic plans, and talking about this commitment in sound bites. However, a message in every setting that permeates the campus environment, policies that hold the faculty accountable for its faculty hiring practices, and equity-oriented action is what is needed. Moreover, leaders must express a firm acknowledgment of systemic racism, the impact of racial microaggressions, and the presence of both implicit and explicit bias on campus, and they must act to address all these issues. It is up to our higher education leaders to dismantle a system that for far too long failed to mirror the population of students on college and university campuses.
Marybeth Gasman is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Doing the Right Thing: How to Undo Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring (Princeton University Press, 2022). Gasman also chairs the Faculty Council at the Rutgers University-New Brunswick campus.
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