Instilling Equity and Inclusion in Departmental Practices
Guiding faculty recruitment and retention
This study will help academic leaders embed equity and inclusion into recruitment, retention, and promotion practices that they can control at the department level.
Despite decades of centrally-led and externally-funded initiatives designed to increase racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among college and university faculty members, most campuses have made little to no progress. Pressure from students and shifting demographics are driving a new urgency among academic leaders to prioritize both greater numerical representation of underrepresented groups among faculty and a more inclusive environment for faculty, students, and staff. Administrators can no longer simply point to a long-codified written commitment to diversity on campus.
The decisions, processes, and preferences that truly impact diversity and inclusion occur at the departmental level—chairs, program heads, and faculty leaders must identify and remedy sources of bias within traditional recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and promotion practices.
It is imperative that institutions analyze unit and department-level trends around hiring and advancement and agree on responsibilities centered on diversity and inclusion processes by role.
In addition, chairs, program heads, and faculty leaders should use the included diagnostics to evaluate existing practices and identify opportunities to improve recruitment and retention practices.
Upstream recruitment
Faculty face many competing demands even before considering their responsibilities to recruit prospective colleagues. The decentralized, highly specialized nature of academic hiring also means that they do not benefit from the dedicated recruitment staff that organizations in the private sector leverage to diversify their hiring pools. One method to significantly ease the recruitment period is to prepare for line allocation with “upstream recruitment,” or pipeline development and networking that occur before a position is even opened.
"Aggressive recruiting doesn’t get you as far as you need. You can’t just send out ads, you have to develop relationships with the people who are trusted most by the people you’re trying to attract.
"Director, Diversity Recruiting Program
Large Research University
Search committee preparation
Search committees are critical to building a sustainable culture of inclusion, a diverse faculty, and the pursuit of academic excellence. We found that most universities have no formal mechanisms to train committee members to conduct searches, let alone give members the tools to reduce bias and expand applicant pools. This often means that search committees, even with the best intentions, are unintentionally perpetuating underrepresentation. Successful institutions train faculty to use search and evaluation methods that limit bias and proactive recruiting and advertising practices through faculty-led seminars.
Job ad composition
Most search committees realize that the job ad is an important opportunity to communicate departmental need, highlight the strengths of the university, and capture the widest possible pool of applicants. However, most job ads fail to leverage these opportunities by using overly specific disciplinary requirements and relying on a templatized equal opportunity statement. Instead, institutions should audit their job descriptions to ensure inclusive language and emphasize that improving faculty diversity is a priority for the department and the institution.
Pre-tenure track appointments
Postdoctoral programs are often a missed opportunity for departments to recruit exceptional URG scholars. The search and hiring process rarely involves faculty or rigorous screening, making faculty skeptical about the qualifications of fellows for tenure-track jobs. Further, most postdocs are siloed away from departmental culture and not viewed as colleagues. While not every postdoc program is designed to recruit future faculty, particularly in the natural sciences, there are many ways to design programs to be more likely to identify and develop scholars who will be a good fit for the institution.
Applicant evaluation
In academic recruiting, the evaluation of prospective faculty candidates is likely the area in which there is the most opportunity for implicit bias to make an impact on faculty decisions. Some elements of hiring are inherently subjective, but there are methods to increase the equity of application evaluation and interview experiences, tactics to increase the diversity of candidates interviewed on campus, and best practices to ensure that equitable processes are implemented in all decentralized search committees.
Professional advancement and development
Retention across demographic groups will depend on making sure faculty of varying tenure ranks have equal access to a variety of professional development opportunities, including traditional mentoring, interactive workshops, targeted grants, and skill-based trainings.
Dean-level strategic hiring initiatives
Although the majority of hiring and recruitment improvements will be focused on departmental practices, many promising strategies require interdepartmental coordination and resources. These dean-level programs, due to their wider purview, can also often have more significant impact in shorter periods of time.
Diagnostics for chairs and deans
Chairs and deans can use diagnostic checklists to evaluate their current practice and identify opportunities to increase equity and inclusion in their recruitment and retention processes.
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