Minority faculty and measuring merit: Start by playing fair

Academe, Jul/Aug 1998 by Alger, Jonathan B

CAN YOU THINK OF A teacher who had a significant influence on your career decisions or outlook on life? Most of us can, because faculty members often serve as role models and motivators. If we want to improve the experience of higher education for minority students, recruiting more minority faculty is one logical step. Recent legal attacks on affirmative action have, however, made colleges and universities nervous about special initiatives designed to attract minority faculty, and the role-model theory has not been accepted as a sufficient legal justification for race-conscious faculty hiring.

So how can colleges and universities recruit and retain more minority faculty? Subtle but far-reaching forms of discrimination can influence the process at every stage, even when the rules appear to be color blind. Thus, before pursuing new policies or programs that might be susceptible to legal challenge, perhaps faculty members themselves should carefully examine how they apply existing rules when evaluating candidates for appointment and promotion.

The Search Process

The search process for new faculty members is a good place to begin. Are your search committees given any training to broaden their perspectives, or enough resources to ensure that they are reaching out to the complete pool of potentially qualified applicants? Do they advertise in journals and periodicals that make special efforts to reach minority graduate students and faculty? Do they rank graduate schools when evaluating candidates? If so, what do they base these rankings on, and how do historically black universities and other institutions that serve many students from minority groups fare in the rankings? Such questions may reveal limitations and hidden biases in the faculty recruitment process.

What about mentoring new faculty members? Studies show that informal mentoring relationships usually develop between senior and junior colleagues who have much in common, because people tend to seek out younger versions of themselves when imparting their wisdom and experience. Do senior faculty members at your institution reach out to junior colleagues from different racial and ethnic backgrounds? To what extent are minority faculty members engaged in discussions about the environment in your department, campus, or community?

Traditional Evaluation Criteria

The traditional criteria applied in evaluations for promotion and tenure often appear to be neutral, but in practice they can have a disparate effect on minority scholars. In analyzing research, for example, reliance on narrow definitions of merit that emphasize publication in traditional journals may slight new or emerging areas of scholarship or practical applications of theory to reallife social and economic problems. In weighing merit in teaching, courses on ethnic studies or courses that include minority perspectives are often taken less seriously than more "mainstream" courses. If an institution offers such courses, why should they be given less weight than other academic subjects? Sometimes institutions force minority faculty members to teach these courses, even if those individuals do not specialize in the topic at hand-and then the institutions hold the faculty members' teaching evaluations against them.

Time and service commitments are often given lip service in tenure and promotion decisions but accorded little weight in practice. For minority faculty members who are asked to serve as representatives on many campus committees, these assignments carry a special burden. Minority faculty members are also often asked to be mentors to minority students regardless of the students' subject-matter interests, a burden rarely imposed on white faculty members.

"Collegiality" is another criterion that is creeping into more and more faculty evaluation processes. Collegiality can be a code word for favoring candidates with backgrounds, interests, and political and social perspectives similar to one's own. This vague and subjective criterion can be used against faculty members whose work and ideas challenge traditional orthodoxy in their departments or institutions.

If we care about recruiting and retaining minority faculty members, we don't need to lower standards or discard the concept of merit. Instead, we need to ensure that existing criteria are applied with a broad enough perspective so that each individual's contributions to the learning environment at the university, both in and outside the classroom, are judged fully and fairly.