New Paradigms for Diversifying Faculty and Staff in Higher Education: Uncovering Cultural Biases in the Search and Hiring Process

Multicultural Education, Winter 2006 by Kayes, Pauline E

Introduction

In the last ten years, many colleges, universities, boards, and agencies have jumped on the diverse faculty/staff hiring bandwagon not only by issuing resolutions, policies, and mandates but also by inventing programs, initiatives, and strategies all intended to increase the number of faculty and staff of color in predominantly White institutions. The statistics illustrate the results: 80-90% of faculty and staff in most colleges and universities are still White.

In fact, as Turner (2002) points out, "efforts to diversify the faculty continue to be amongst the least successful elements of campus commitments to diversity" (p.14). So, why, despite the best intentions, are most of these programs and policies failing to increase faculty/staff diversity? With the "window of opportunity" for diverse hiring limited to the next five years or so of faculty retirements, many higher education administrators and bureaucrats are scrambling desperately to find an answer, especially since the growing gap between a multicultural student body and a monocultural faculty/staff has become an educational and political problem.

Unfortunately what is often overlooked in the diverse hiring conundrum is the crucial role that both search committees and institutional culture play in the recruitment and retention of diverse faculty and staff at predominantly White colleges and universities.

Myths and Assumptions

There are many myths and assumptions underlying the so-called "promising" New Paradigms for Diversifying Faculty and Staff in Higher Education: Uncovering Cultural Biases in the Search and Hiring Process practices for diverse faculty/staff hiring that, for the most part, are ineffective in actually changing the overall composition of the faculty. One of the most common is that if the president, dean, provost, chancellor, department chair, human resources officer, and trustees all openly advocate for faculty and staff diversity then it will be actualized in the search and hiring process. This myth assumes that those who serve on search committees also prioritize diverse hiring when in reality many have never even discussed, let alone agreed upon, the institutional and departmental advantages of a diverse faculty and staff.

To be sure, administrative leadership is crucial to a college's success in attracting, hiring, and keeping faculty and staff of color, but if there is any resistance to diversity and multiculturalism in the institutional culture, such advocacy can spawn a backlash that plays out behind the closed doors of search committee deliberations.

Another more insidious myth is that diversity intern, exchange, mentor, and "grow your own" programs will expand the pool of diverse candidates for faculty positions, which will, in turn, automatically ensure diverse hires for those positions. This set of programs reinforces the notion that the only reason for the dearth of diverse hires is that there are no diverse candidates in the pool. Again, diverse candidate pools do not necessarily result in diverse hires because institutional, departmental, and search committee cultures can overtly and covertly undermine the goal of faculty/staff diversity.

Finally, recruitment of diverse faculty and staff is not retention, so any initiatives to diversify faculty and staff that do not address hostile institutional and faculty/staff cultures will end up fueling the "revolving door" so common for faculty and staff of color. As a result, the first step in successfully diversifying faculty and staff is naming and understanding the nature of institutional and individual resistance to diverse hiring in predominantly White colleges and universities.

Naming and Understanding Resistance

Admittedly, addressing resistance to diversity by institutions and individuals is more complex and difficult than inventing short-term fixes, projects, and strategies, but failing to do so will result in only temporary and cosmetic changes in diverse hiring statistics and not in real, long-term diversification of the faculty. Since colleges and universities are composed of people who all carry the baggage of stereotypes and biases, such institutions cannot become progressive, multicultural educational environments without the consent and cooperation of these individuals.

In other words, an institutional culture cannot evolve from a bare-minimum affirmative action approach to diversity to one that values diversity as a competitive advantage for institutions and individuals without comprehensive diversity education for all the people who make up that culture. Although search committees are a microcosm of this dynamic, most search committees are not given any professional development on diverse hiring except for the most general guidance on personnel issues. This lack of expanded professional development on diverse hiring for search committees prevents them from examining how their cultural biases can determine the search and hiring process.

Dovidio (1997) characterizes how this lapse in analysis, what he terms "aversive racism," can impact search committee deliberations: