BY MARYBETH GASMAN
Faculty are at the core of undoing systemic racism in faculty hiring.
Within research universities—specifically those that are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU)—there are two factors that are most likely to determine who becomes a tenure-track faculty member. First, the institution a faculty candidate attends for their PhD and, second, the person who served as the faculty candidate’s PhD advisor.
We need to see immediate change in the hiring process at our colleges and universities. A broad diversity of individuals needs to sit on hiring committees, and faculty input must be central. All those involved in the process must be open to change and to the possibility that the system has a different impact on different people depending on a variety of identities, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion.
Shared governance—faculty participation in institutional governance, including “personnel decisions, selection of administrators, preparation of the budget, and determination of educational policies”—is essential and works effectively to ensure thought-provoking curricula as well as intellectual integrity, but in other ways, shared governance allows faculty to perpetuate sameness in faculty hiring. In an ideal system of shared governance, faculty would hold their colleagues accountable around issues of equity in the hiring of faculty members, but I have rarely seen that happen. The data don’t indicate robust accountability in faculty hiring, and the research related to faculty hiring shows little evidence either.
Search committees are made up of influential faculty members, and the structures of shared governance—stronger at some institutions than others—provide immense support for search committee decisions and the maintenance of the status quo (that is, sameness and whiteness).
Chief diversity officers, who are rarely ever tenured faculty, are becoming more involved in the faculty hiring process at many AAU institutions, but their role is undefined and often faculty members don’t understand their position, the work they do, or why they are involved with the hiring process. Some faculty members even oppose their involvement as they believe faculty hiring should not have input from “outsiders” and see administrative diversity efforts as an impingement on their academic freedom and the foundation of shared governance.
What would happen if faculty used the power that is linked to their shared governance voice—their contributions to university decision-making—to foster justice and equity regarding the faculty? What would result if faculty members realized that diversifying the faculty is their responsibility and that not doing so is evidence that they don’t support, and are intellectually lazy about, issues of equity? And how would the academy change if faculty members realized, acknowledged, and grappled with the role that they play in upholding systemic racism in the academy, and especially within the faculty hiring process?
Not everyone is comfortable with this type of change and often faculty members hide behind shared governance and academic freedom to uphold the status quo that benefits them. Although embracing diversity and pursuing equity are essential goals for systemic change in higher education, they are slow in coming.
It is vital to convince faculty members that regardless of their disciplines and intellectual expertise, it is their role—part of their shared governance obligations—to become educated about the ways that pedigree and whiteness undergird systemic racism in faculty hiring. If we are aware of the problems in the pipeline, the obstacles in the hiring process, and the issues that manifest because of our personal biases, we must work to concretely change the overall system that only works for a few—the same system that, in effect, limits knowledge by limiting who produces it. Individuals from all racial and ethnic backgrounds are essential to creating knowledge and should have the opportunity to do so in an environment that appreciates, affirms, and supports them.
If the academy is honest in its commitment to hiring a diverse faculty, we must do the hard work of dismantling a system that was built to support white men and exclude white women and people of color. We’ve made progress with white women, demonstrating that we know how to make change that leads to more inclusivity. Instead of congratulating ourselves on the mediocre success we have achieved with regard to diversifying the professoriate, we must be honest about the lack of substantial progress we have made, the pervasiveness of systemic racism, the role that the negative aspects of shared governance play in the maintenance of the status quo, the privileging of pedigree and narrow definitions of quality, and our roles in stymieing opportunity for people of color who want to pursue faculty careers. Only then can higher education begin to live up to the lofty ideals expressed around academic excellence in every college mission statement.
Marybeth Gasman is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair and a distinguished professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. Her newest book is Doing the Right Thing: How Colleges and Universities Can Undo Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring. She also serves as the chair of the Rutgers University, New Brunswick Faculty Council.
I agree that prestige discrimination is a serious flaw in academic hiring. Relying upon the fame of a faculty advisor, or the fame of the institution, is a disturbing violation of academic standards that should engage in hiring based on individual merit and potential, rather than prestige. I’d be curious to know about the documentary evidence that prestige discrimination in hiring occurs, and that faculty of color are particularly harmed by this practice.
I also would like to see evidence of prestige discrimination because. The opening line that program and advisor are key determinants of being hired misses the point. It isn’t about filling a position, that’s easy. It’s about filling the position with someone that ends up being productive and successful. So the question is not whether the program and advisor predicts being hired, it is whether the program and advisor predicts success. I don’t know the answer, but I hope we all agree that no reputable search committee would hire a new PhD from an online, for-profit university with self-published work at a vanity press. Of course there is more quality variation in programs than just online vs. campus. Is that prestige discrimination? Not sure, but it is 100% appropriate to use the quality of program, as well as the quality of training/advising/writings/etc., to determine the candidate’s likelihood of success. I would be shocked that any search committee ONLY looked at the candidate’s PhD program, and it would be equally shocking if a search committee ignored something so important.
John K, Wilson writes “I’d be curious to know about the documentary evidence that prestige discrimination in hiring occurs, and that faculty of color are particularly harmed by this practice.”
While I cannot address all disciplines, in one of my professional fields, anthropology, there have been at least a couple of studies of prestige hiring that showed that a small number of top departments supply a very large percentage of TT faculty at all colleges and universities in the U.S., and that it is almost never the case that lower-ranked departments supply TT faculty to the top departments. The oldest of these studies appeared in the American Anthropologist a number of years ago — presented as a kind of tongue-in-cheek version of hypergamy, explicitly using Leach’s classic study of Highland Burma as its model, but full of interesting insights nonetheless. It’s probably out of date now. My other discipline, law, is notorious for prestige hiring, both in major firms and in law schools — the advice we give undergraduates looking at law school is that anything apart from a top 10 law school could be problematic for jobs later. That’s more anecdotal, of course, but it drives a lot of decisions.
I am unable to comment on the impact these practices have on hiring faculty of color.
This makes me wonder what the author thinks of the Academic Freedom Alliance’s new statement calling for an end to required diversity statements. Their statement is online here: https://academicfreedom.org/afa-calls-for-an-end-to-required-diversity-statements/
This essay is a bit disturbing and extremely detached from reality. With over 30 years in academia across multiple institutions, I’ve witnessed (1st, 2nd and 3rd hand) a dramatic pendulum swing in faculty hiring. Early on, there was a disturbing norm of indifference of the issues and sometimes explicit discriminatory against under represented candidates. Often the discrimination was due to institutional constraints (e.g., insufficient capacity to manage visas) and low standards (e.g., get someone that wants to stay to avoid another search). Today, there is a disturbing group think that implicitly discriminates that argues (as in this essay) that “the search committee’s responsibility is to diversify the faculty”. In many fields, search committees are scrambling to hire under represented candidates. Bidding wars (with higher salaries, lower teaching loads and extra summer support) are going on to hire under representative candidates. The pendulum has swung.
It is absolutely untrue and a stunningly ignorant to claim the search committee’s responsibility is to diversify the faculty. The search committee’s job is to hire the best candidate possible. Period. Not doing so is failure to do its job, whether they choose a lesser candidate because they are white and heterosexual 25 years ago or brown and homosexual last year. Fortunately, usually a focus on hiring the best candidate leads to more diversity. The biases of 25 years ago don’t hold up.
The point is that search processes should focus on how to best determine the best candidate. For new PhDs, this is not an easy task. In the past, the program and advisor was deemed good signals for a strong candidate. Other things matter as well. The person’s job market paper, publication record, teaching record, etc. It is legitimate to weigh each of these items to determine a candidate’s promise. Of course, if we’re pursuing our task of hiring the best possible candidate, we will continually review the process and measures that are considered. Better evidence of promise is certainly welcome. But what some seem to suggest is to throw out all items of evidence so search committees can hire for diversity–i.e., hire based on race, gender, religion, etc.
The author argues for immediate changes to achieve diversity, but she is vague about how search committees should ‘pursue diversity’. This is critically important. We can and should improve the process to generate a more diverse candidate pool and create a more inclusive interview process. And we can improve how we assess the quality of candidates. However we cannot hire someone because they add diversity (because of their race or other identity). That’s explicitly illegal. Too many people (and too many DEI trainings) openly argue that faculty should skirt the law by changing the job criteria/requirements and requiring diversity statements to steer the search to implicitly prefer one group of people over another. That’s simply unprofessional and unethical, and it violates the spirit of the law.