Universities around the world have seen their student bodies grow more and more diverse over the past few decades. Part of that is because of international immigration, and part of it is as a result of policies encouraging the admission of students from different racial and ethnic groups. In the US, student bodies at leading public and private universities became dramatically more diverse, in terms of race and ethnicity, by the end of the 1970s.
But faculty demographics have been slower to change. In most countries, the dominant group, which is often the majority group, continues to hold most faculty positions. When student bodies first began to diversify, it was no surprise that faculty lagged behind because training undergraduate, then master’s, then doctoral students to enter the professoriate took time. But in many countries, the pipeline is no longer the real the problem. More people from historically disadvantaged groups are getting PhDs and seeking to enter the professoriate, but universities have trouble recruiting and retaining them.
The problem looks quite a bit like the problem that corporations have had in hiring and keeping managers of colour. When corporations look at their own numbers, some see that people of colour are less likely to stay on the job and move up. It’s tempting to put that down to the preferences of those people. Perhaps they don’t want to work in our kind of firm. Perhaps they don’t want to work in an area where they are isolated from their own race or ethnic community. Perhaps they face unusual financial or social challenges as a consequence of their immigrant or minoritised status.
- How to protect inclusive educational practices in increasingly hostile environments
- Should university admissions decisions rely on academic performance?
- Four ways to boost diversity in environmental science
We have been analysing how firms can recruit and retain people of colour, and keep them on for long enough to make it into management positions. Our analyses are diagnostic of the problems that lead to poor recruitment and high attrition. We look at data from hundreds of corporations employing millions of workers over dozens of years, with the goal of assessing which kinds of hiring, development, work-life, harassment and other management policies and structures help promote recruitment and stem attrition of people from different groups.
In recent years we’ve been looking at similar data from universities to address the question: what kinds of faculty hiring, development, work-life, harassment and other policies help boost recruitment and stem attrition of people of colour in academia? We find that the same kinds of policies that help in the corporate world help in universities.
The good news is that the things that help are not under attack by opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). First, broadening recruitment to identify candidates of colour is hugely effective. For corporate managers that means visiting universities that serve mostly non-white populations. For university faculty it means encouraging departments to recruit the best candidates regardless of specialty in a given year through target-of-opportunity programmes, through which departments are allowed to fill special research or teaching needs outside regular hiring authorisations, including the need to build a teaching staff that looks more like the student body. These help diversify faculty because when a department hires in a narrow field – molecular biology rather than just biology – there might be few eligible rookies in a given year, and no Black candidates. Thus narrow searches can reduce the diversity of new faculty members.
Second, offering every junior corporate staff member, and every new assistant professor, a mentor is the single most effective strategy for retaining talent of colour. One reason is that without a formal mentoring programme, senior staff tend to mentor junior staff from the same group – so white men supporting white men in American universities – and junior staff from other groups are often neglected.
Third, work-life programmes that help people with family challenges to succeed are also hugely effective. In the US, where work-life support mostly comes from the employer, this means parental leave and childcare assistance – so, parental leave or modified teaching duties for faculty, as well as on-site childcare centres, subsidies and childcare referral services. Such policies not only help to retain Black, Hispanic and Asian American women, but also men from those groups. It stands to reason; on average people from those groups have less family wealth or are more likely to be without access to help from family members. Even the most symbolic of these supports – childcare referrals – boosts diversity, which suggests that universities really need to signal that they want to help people with family demands to succeed.
The policies that help with diversity are best management practices, period. So, trying to recruit the best rookies each year regardless of specialty is just good policy – something that top US sociology departments have long practised. Giving every new assistant professor a mentor, or mentoring team, is good practice for developing talent. Offering work-life support to all faculty is a good way to help people through short-term caregiving or scheduling challenges.
Our research also shows that many of the DEI programmes that have sparked the anti-DEI movement don’t work anyway. Diversity training to educate faculty about their biases tends to backfire, reducing retention rather than increasing it. Much-hated types of anti-harassment training show adverse effects.
Now universities can safely let go of the contentious failed policies and focus on recruitment, retention and career development best practices, which just happen to disproportionately improve recruitment and retention of faculty from under-represented groups.
Frank Dobbin is the Henry Ford II professor of the social sciences in the department of sociology at Harvard University. Alexandra Kalev is professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University. They are co-authors of Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t (Harvard University Press, 2022).
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
comment