Faculty Hiring

Authors: Culpepper, D., Reed, A. M., Enekwe, B., Carter-Veale, W., LaCourse, W. R., McDermott, P., & Cresiski, R. H.

Calls to diversify the professoriate have been ongoing for decades. However, despite increasing numbers of scholars from underrepresented racial minority groups earning doctorates, actual progress in transitioning to faculty has been slow, particularly across STEM disciplines.

Authors: Gonzales, L.D., Culpepper, D., & Anderson, J.

Colleges and universities are formidable knowledge-producing spaces in society. At the heart of these knowledge producing spaces are academics who carry out teaching, research, and service amid other education activities. Accordingly, academic hiring, which includes hiring into any instructional and/or research position in a college or university, is a significant opportunity to shape the kinds of knowledge(s) that are generated, taught, and shared with society.

Authors: Culpepper, D., White-Lewis, D., O’Meara, K., Templeton, L., & Anderson, J.

Many colleges and universities now require faculty search committees to use rubrics when evaluating faculty job candidates, as proponents believe these “decision-support tools” can reduce the impact of bias in candidate evaluation. That is, rubrics are intended to ensure that candidates are evaluated more fairly, which is then thought to contribute to the enhanced hiring of candidates from minoritized groups. However, there is scant — and even contradictory — evidence to support this claim.

Authors: O’Meara, K., Culpepper, D., & Templeton, L.

This narrative and integrative literature review synthesizes the literature on when, where, and how the faculty hiring process used in most American higher education settings operates with implicit and cognitive bias. The literature review analyzes the “four phases” of the faculty hiring process, drawing on theories from behavioral economics and social psychology.

Authors: White-Lewis, D., Culpepper, D. K., O'Meara, K., Templeton, L., & Anderson, J.

Many faculty members believe that the racial demography of their disciplines afford highly qualified, racially minoritized scholars more power in the academic job market. As such, search committees may not offer faculty positions to candidates from these groups because they perceive them to be high risk and difficult to retain. One often cited study debunked this myth, showing that highly competitive racially minoritized candidates did not have more offers; however, the study was published over two decades ago and the narrative still remains.

Authors: Liera, R., & Ching, C.

This chapter shows how academic hiring practices—including the beliefs, values, and biases around “merit” and “fit”—perpetuate racial inequities by leaving unexamined and unquestioned the shared, racialized assumptions that guide hiring, recruitment, screening, and evaluation. The chapter provides a framework, grounded in Bensimon’s concept of “equity-mindedness,” to redefine “merit” and “fit” in terms of racial equity and justice.

Authors: Kazmi, M. A., Spitzmueller, C., Yu, J., Madera, J. M., Tsao, A. S., Dawson, J. F., & Pavlidis, I.

The diversification of applicant pools constitutes an important step for broadening the participation of women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) in the workforce. The current study focuses on recruiting diverse applicant pools in an academic setting. We test strategies grounded in homophily theory to attract a diverse set of applicants for open faculty positions.

Authors: White-Lewis, D.K.

Various concerns regarding the vitality and racial/ethnic composition of the academic profession have prompted new study of faculty search committees and hiring paradigms, most notably examining the term “ft” in candidate appraisals. Yet no study utilizes a candidate evaluation framework to investigate whether or not faculty members truly assess for ft, or if these assessments stife diversifcation processes, especially in light of pervasive institutional eforts to reform faculty hiring.

Authors: O’Meara, K., Templeton, L. L., White-Lewis, D. K., Culpepper, D., & Anderson, J.

Efforts to mitigate bias in faculty hiring processes are well-documented in the literature. Yet, significant barriers to the hiring of racially minoritized and White women in many STEM fields remain. An underreported barrier to inclusive hiring is assessment of risk. Guided by theory from behavioral economics, social psychology, and decision-making, we examine the inner workings of five faculty search committees to understand how committee members identified and assessed risk with particular attention to assessments of risk that became intermingled with social biases.