Workshop material
Breakout room discussions
The following notes have been curated from the “Padlet” application that Liera and White-Lewis used to capture breakout ideas.
Questions posed to participants
How does Whiteness operate in your office/department? Consider how it operates through power dynamics.
What does racial equity in faculty hiring mean to you and to your office/department?
Broadly discuss the benefits and challenges networks and institutional type in faculty hiring.
What research study would help you in your role to advance racial equity in faculty hiring?
What strategies and solutions do you feel confident about introducing in your unit this year?
What strategies and solutions still leave you skeptical? Why?
What has worked well in your unit that you would like to share with your group members?
How can we ensure that racial equity is everybody’s work, rather than a select agentic few?
What recruitment tactics have you seen/used to disrupt networks?
Questions raised by participants
How do we break out of the hierarchical/closed network system of PhD admissions and faculty hiring?
How to increase representation on search committees without overburdening the same small group of faculty?
Does the breadth of search topic help with "fit"?
Diversity statements: I struggle with evaluating them? How do you read them? How do you identify an "honest" or "authentic" one, how a "cynical" one?
In our department we look for evidence vs. sentiments. We also think about how the 'problem' of DEI is framed (e.g. 'treat everyone the same' vs acknowledging that different people need different approaches).
Rubric Definitions: I have found Rubrics really helpful in the hiring process for my lab and we recently developed a rubric for our graduate student admissions review. One thing that struck me was how difficult it was to come to a shared understanding of the different rubric categories/rankings. I am wondering if there are recommendations or best practices for review or search committees to work through rubric definitions together so that there is at least some baseline for how to interpret the rubric definitions.
Observations
Limitations and boundaries that result from expectation of niceness: The unwritten expectation that we relate and engage 'nicely' with each other reinforces the existing power structure and limits the ability for anyone and especially people who are different (not white) from disagreeing with the status quo. And when people or their contributions to a conversation are labeled as 'not nice' it is used as an excuse to ignore their statement even though the content of what they shared is valuable.
We discussed two instances where predominantly white faculty were utterly unprepared to interview and consider non-white faculty. This is one way that whiteness operates in faculty hiring.
Dig deeper into process: Different units face challenges at different stages of the search: building a pool, selection, campus visit and closing the deal.
And this is rooted in the entire pathway, from K-12 start
I really like the idea of being mindful of resources available to each candidate and formally considering how each candidate might contribute given the resources available at the hiring institution.
Great talk in the breakout room about operationalizing "good intentions" — it takes a structured process and active input by multiple mutually reinforcing parties.
It doesn't matter how pretty or thought through the first 90% of the search process was, if the outcome replicates what has always been the case, that is a “fail”. It’s the need to "go the last mile" (and actually successfully hire someone who brings DEI).
Discussions of “things that work”
Create space for promising faculty from less resourced institutions by having a cushion or on-ramp before tenure.
Think about who's "over the bar" and prioritize among them rather than obsessing about who's the "superstar".
Shift from paper-counting / quantity to focus on quality and achieving some minimum count.
Run events for underrepresented PhD students from other universities to help nurture the next generation of applicants to your university.
With respect to senior hiring, talking about past impact on the field could be skewed by the inequities in the system; perhaps talking about future impact is a better strategy.
We can increase the faculty pool by building on pathways programs.
For accountability, Deans, Provosts, Presidents need to be able to exert power to turn back searches — ideally, before finalists are named — and to hold Colleges, other units accountable for pre-hiring stage activities, methods, mechanisms that increase access to open searches.
Affinity groups can be a resource for identifying candidates, recruiting, candidate assessment.
Have faculty document DEI work/trainings on yearly evaluations.
Resources, comments, and questions from the workshop “chat” window
RESOURCES
UCLA Samueli Launches Mentor Professor Program to Enhance Equity and Diversity: https://samueli.ucla.edu/ucla-samueli-launches-mentor-professor-program-to-enhance-equity-and-diversity/
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
Probably the case that gender is also an important category re: niceness.
I have definitely seen this in graduate student recruiting (and a little in faculty hiring): an assumption that students from institution X must be good… despite many counterexamples.
We don't hire from our own department on principle, but given the fact that our PhD population is significantly more diverse than our faculty population, it does seem in principle that hiring one's own could actually be a strategy to diversify.
If there is specific recognition to individuals for diversity work, I wonder if that could actually lead to more compartmentalization... it should be everyone’s job!
Liera: Yes, it can lead to further compartmentalization. However, for some reason faculty tend to be competitive when it comes to what their peers are being recognized for. A lot of these strategies are also dependent on where your university is at with regards to racial equity. For example, in one study (not necessarily related to just faculty hiring), when a department increased the number of students of color, the student newspaper highlighted their efforts. In this way, the department and the people doing the work were recognized for their work. If the concern is about further compartmentalizing, then departments can integrate values for racial equity into their missions which then search committees can integrate and use to justify why as a committee they need to engage with racial equity work.
Another strategy is for the chair of search committees to give the equity advocate the podium before interviewing begins to train everyone on how unconscious bias impacts search committees and again after meeting each candidate to discuss each candidate's DEI skills and vision.
Which institutions represented in this room have "equity advocates" like Prof. Liera is describing?
Cornell has a 'broadening participation' committee in our department that plays a similar role, I think.
Columbia University requires a member of each search committee to serve as “diversity advocate”.
UPenn has Diversity Search Advisors.
We have similar mechanisms (far from perfect) in our department at Princeton.
Yale is required to have a Diversity Advocate on all hiring committees and on the grad recruiting committee.
Stanford (in my department) we also have this mechanism.
At the Yale School of Public Health, the Associate Dean for DEI serves on all faculty search committees.
We have one for our pediatric residency program at Yale.
Dartmouth has equity advocates/advisors in each Dean’s office engaged with searches, not necessarily on each search committee.
All departments at Princeton have “search officers” whose responsibility includes advancing diversity in hiring, but this hasn’t always happened in practice.
University of Chicago does not use the term "Equity" per central leadership.
A question I am always asked is how to "weight" consideration of DEI contribution vs. other criteria in the search process.
I am wondering how to think about diversity statements. We do require them, and read and consider them, but I am not sure if they are as helpful as they could be, and wondering if we should switch to look for evidence of DEI-related aspects in research and teaching statements. (Have heard some critiques that they are just window dressing.)
Liera: I would encourage you to think about DEI in research and teaching and service.
Can you share how you instruct applicants re: diversity statement?
https://facultydevelopment.cornell.edu/information-for-faculty-candidates/
We used rubric guided DEI statements with concrete examples. They were read first along w future research statements. They weighed as much as all other criteria. Our long list was enriched for diversity compared to the overall applicant pool.
As a Chair, I tend to treat the requirement that applicants submit a diversity statement as a way to signal to the applicants that our department is invested in DEI. This is perhaps more important than the statements we receive, which are always trumped by actual evidence by DEI engagement.
We also included diversity considerations in teaching and mentoring rubric. (Of course that’s an n of 1.)
Here is a highly recommended primer on using Diversity Statements in which UC Davis Law Professor Brian Soucek tells you everything you need to know based on use of policy -- quite successfully -- at their campus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epvgJY20hsg.
I know this is a meeting about the search process, but we have not spoken about one of the elephants in the room which is the promotion criteria. Search committees often think about how candidates measure up to their promotion criteria. Thus, a parallel process is to change how the promotion criteria value DEI work and scholarship.
The job ad, as well as the applicant portal, can signal a desire to see DEI elements within this holistic framework. Example: the prompt for research statement can bring up Broader Impacts as a core element within that response, not just as a separate prompt.
Could you say more about departmental readiness for these concepts? How do we assess readiness?
+1: We are dealing with some faculty defensiveness...
+1: Departmental readiness, College readiness
Key publications by our workshop leaders
By Dr. Roman Liera:
Moving beyond a culture of niceness in faculty hiring to advance racial equity (2020)
Color-evasive racism in the final stage of faculty searches: Examining search committee hiring practices that jeopardize racial equity policy (2021, with T. E. Hernandez)
Equity advocates using equity-mindedness to interrupt faculty hiring’s racial structure (2020)
Reconceptualizing “merit” and “fit”: An equity-minded approach to hiring. In Kezar, A., Posselt, J. (Eds.), Administration for social justice and equity in higher education: Critical perspectives for leadership and decision-making. New York, NY: Routledge. (2019, with C. Ching)
By Dr. Damani White-Lewis
Additional works cited
Publications and resources referenced in this workshop will be posted here.
Cheryan, S., & Markus, H. R. (2020). Masculine defaults: Identifying and mitigating hidden cultural biases. Psychological Review, 127(6), 1022–1052. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000209
Bastedo, M., Bowman, N., Glasener, K. & Kelly, J. (2018) What are We Talking About When We Talk About Holistic Review? Selective College Admissions and its Effects on Low-SES Student. The Journal of Higher Education (89)5, 782-805. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2018.1442633