BY CHELSEA FOWLER

When Frances McDormand delivered her 2018 Oscars acceptance speech, she left the audience with two final words, “inclusion rider,” which sparked a flurry of Google searches across the US. Inclusion rider is a relatively new term coined by Dr. Stacy L. Smith at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. These riders seek to increase the presence of diverse actors and crew members in the film industry through contractual language initiated by lead actors. Following the Oscars, a number of celebrities, including Michael B. Jordan and Brie Larson, committed to using inclusion riders to ensure diversity on the set, showing that the idea could dramatically impact the silver screen.

Higher education is another field that could benefit from increased diversity, particularly gender diversity in faculty ranks. Female faculty, for example, are concentrated in low and middle-rank positions and face challenges making it to the highest rank. One way to support female faculty and other minorities is for senior faculty to adapt the idea of inclusion, or equity, riders and implement them at their institution.

In higher education, could an inclusion rider be used by a sought-after faculty member during the hiring process to call for increased diversity within department faculty ranks as a condition of accepting the job? Or by a faculty union to mandate that institutions provide equal resources, promotion, and recognition to women faculty?

What do you think? Can the concept of an inclusion rider be applied to higher education? What would it look like and would it make a difference?

Share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Chelsea Fowler is the AAUP’s research assistant.