by Augusta Palmer
One year ago, Zoom IN published an informative post about creating an Anti-Racist Course in Film and Media. As college professors, so much of what we do outside the classroom – in departmental, divisional, committee meetings and on faculty search committees – can also be of tremendous importance. The EDIT 5 surveyed Media studies and production faculty to provide a list of recommended practices for department chairs and administrators interested in fostering inclusive media production programs. EDIT 5’s first suggested practice, Broaden Your Team, addresses how to create more faculty diversity through inclusive hiring:
Implement hiring practices for increasing diversity among your faculty. Provide outreach and recruitment to underrepresented groups in job searches. Provide training in inclusive hiring practices for faculty and staff, including acknowledging ways bias influences hiring decisions.
As faculty teaching media production and studies, we can address the need for more diverse hires during the search committee process, a time and place where we can exert influence on the present and future diversity of our colleagues.
Why is faculty diversity important? Diversity is an engine that accelerates creativity and innovation. A diverse college experience better prepares all students for diversifying work places and societies. Faculty diversity is not just a moral imperative, it’s also empirically beneficial. Minority students are much more likely to see minority faculty as role models, making them more likely to become academics themselves. (Egalite and Kisida) Achievement gaps for minority students can even be closed by 20-50% when faculty diversity matches student diversity. (Fairlie, et al.)
Though diversity varies according to institution and discipline, the overall numbers on the racial and ethnic diversity for faculty at American colleges and universities are abysmal. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2018 were only 6% black, 12% Asian American and 6% latinx. Indigenous faculty members accounted for 1% or less of full-time faculty. 75% of all full time faculty were white. (Fast Facts: Race/Ethnicity of College Faculty, NCES)
To change this all search committees should have training about unconscious bias and receive clear directions about how to build and support faculty diversity. But even with this kind of support, faculty on search committees are often failing to hire diverse candidates.
According to data collected by the American Council on Education, recent numbers on new hires are not much better: whites accounted for 60% of new hires, blacks accounted for 7.5%, latinx for 5.7%, Asian Americans were 9.4% and indigenous people were only 0.6%. Clearly, we can and must do better, especially as the U.S. population and the population of college students is more rapidly diversifying. (“Fast Facts: Enrollment”)
In “A Bad Fit?” Colleen Flaherty makes it clear that one of the biggest obstacles to diversity in hiring is the flawed notion of “fit”. We’ve all heard search committee members say, “I’m not sure this person is the right ‘fit’ for our department/program/institution.” What they often mean is that this candidate does not look or sound like the members of the search committee.
Damani K. White-Lewis, author of a recent study on the role fit plays in hiring, writes that poorly defined notions of “fit” are “poorly suited to justify academic hiring decisions.” Rather than rejecting “fit,” Lewis-White suggests search committees define it, creating a rubric collectively that addresses all of the qualifications, skills and qualities a hire in the proposed position needs to have.
Asking fellow search committee members to define “fit” is an important first step, as is setting out explicit criteria of excellence for the position. Diverse hires can lead us to re-evaluate unexamined assumptions, values and procedures. They can bring new perspectives on power and language. We hire new faculty to improve and build our departments, to create a new sense of our programs and disciplines, and to change campus culture for the better. A diverse hire is often the best “fit” for the campus culture we want to create for our students (and ourselves).
Search committee rubrics should also include equity and diversity requirements, requiring the committee to explicitly define how important these factors are in the hire and discuss how diversity will impact the department and the university. Jointly creating hiring rubrics that include equity and diversity as well as academic qualifications should be part of what a search committee does. This simple adjustment is a way to make sure biases are made explicit and discussed in order to create fair and equal criteria for hiring.
Transparency and data are essential for change. We’re not always aware of the statistics on race and hiring at our own institutions. As faculty members, we can ask that our colleges and universities create a Diversity Dashboard like the one in use at University of Virginia, or, at the very least, that our institutions provide these statistics to share with search committees.
Of course, making university faculty more diverse only begins with the search committee. As JoAnn Moody details in her book Faculty Diversity: Removing the Barriers, academics need to work to create faculty diversity in three major areas: recruitment, retention and mentoring. If we hire more diverse faculty, we also need to make sure we retain and tenure them at equitable rates. Zoom IN welcomes posts on retention and mentoring to support a diverse faculty.
The data makes it clear that unconscious bias is negatively impacting our efforts to create a more diverse faculty. We have the knowledge, the power and the will to change how hires are made. What’s needed is structural and procedural change that combats embedded, structural bias about gender, race, class and disability. Asking for increased transparency, creating rubrics for hiring, and engaging in thoughtful discussion about explicit and implicit bias with committee members and administrators can enable us to change our institutional cultural one hire at a time.
Works Cited
Egalite AJ, Kisida B. The Effects of Teacher Match on Students’ Academic Perceptions and Attitudes. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. 2018;40(1):59-81. doi:10.3102/0162373717714056. Accessed July 24, 2021.
Fairlie, Robert W., et al. “A Community College Instructor Like Me: Race and EthnicityInteractions in the Classroom.” The American Economic Review, vol. 104, no. 8, 2014, pp. 2567–2591. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42920900. Accessed July 25, 2021.
“Fast Facts: Race/Ethnicity of College Faculty.” IES>NCES National Center for EducationalStatistics, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61. Accessed July 24, 2021.
Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: 2020 Supplement. American Council on Education,November 2020, https://www.equityinhighered.org/data-tables/. Accessed July 24, 2021.
“Fast Facts: Enrollment.” IES>NCES National Center for Educational Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98, Accessed July 24, 2021.
White-Lewis, Damani K. “The Facade of Fit in Faculty Search Processes.” The Journal of Higher Education (Columbus) 91.6 (2020): 833–857. Web. Accessed July 24, 2021.
Colleen Flaherty. “A Bad Fit? Study finds the concept of faculty fit in hiring is vague and potentially detrimental to diversity efforts.” Inside Higher Ed, July 14, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/14/study-concept-faculty-fit-hiring-vague-and-potentially-detrimental-diversity-efforts. Accessed July 24, 2021.
JoAnn Moody. Faculty Diversity: Removing the Barriers. NY: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Augusta Palmer is a filmmaker and scholar whose current projects include The Blues Society, a feature documentary about blues music and culture in 1960s Memphis. Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Communication Arts Department at St. Francis College. She is also the editor of the Zoom IN blog at EDIT Media. Zoom IN welcomes blog posts from media studies & media production faculty and students on any other topic relating to Equity and Diversity in Teaching Media. Please send blog post ideas here.
