Why BIPOC Faculty Leave Their Jobs—And How to Design Policies That Will Encourage Them to Stay

Over the past decade, community colleges have focused on hiring more BIPOC faculty to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student body. They’ve used best practices like cluster hiring, inclusive job advertisements, and implicit bias training for hiring committees to increase faculty diversity on campus. But even the best hiring plans fail without a plan for retention and engagement. What’s more, a lot of BIPOC faculty are feeling disengaged—nationwide, they’re more likely to face unequal workloads, and a working environment that creates feelings of isolation and burnout.

On most community college campuses, leaders have tried to create more inclusive climates through education, training, and informal mentorship arrangements. But these approaches leave out the fact that institutional racism and inequity is not just an individual problem, it’s also a structural problem that requires structural solutions. The good news is that your institution probably has the right structures in place: hundreds of community college campuses recently added a chief diversity officer or created a DEIJ strategic plan, committee, or taskforce to tackle these challenges. Leaders must now leverage those structures and resource investments to create workplaces where BIPOC faculty can thrive.

In this past working group session, community college academic and campus diversity leaders discussed best practices from institutions that are rethinking structures and policies for faculty retention. Learn how community colleges across the U.S. and Canada have incorporated principles of diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice into promotion requirements, and see key design features of equitable faculty evaluation and workload policy.