Last year I was on a search committee for an Assistant Professor of English with a speciality in African American literature. All committee members were white. The faculty in the English department were mostly white. The last professor we hired to teach African American literature, the position we were filling, was an African American woman who left our department to teach in the Middle East.
We spent several hundred hours as a committee on this search, and in the end, we offered the job to a candidate who happened to be white. And a man. He was, given all that we had to work with, the best candidate. Instead of hiring the candidate, however, our dean shut down the search, citing a lack of diversity in the pool.
So it was with great interest that I read Marybeth Gasman’s piece, “The Five Things No One Will Tell You About Why Colleges Don’t Hire More Faculty of Color,” on The Hechinger Report. I recommend you read this before proceeding.
I have mixed feelings about my own experience on that hiring committee. I felt like the committee did its best, and that we selected the best candidate from the hiring pool. Speaking plainly, I wanted to hire an African American to teach African American literature. I wasn’t quite sure how to do that when we were reading applications. Certain characteristics point to racial identity but that’s a slippery slope. Add to that the idea of hiring someone because of their ethnicity, and I wasn’t sure that was legal.
I know I’m not alone. The other members of the committee wanted more diversity in our department. We were painfully aware of the lack of diversity among faculty at an institution with a high percentage of minority students. You might even say we pushed for a position with a specialty in African American literature because we wanted diversity.
And this is where it got tricky. Were we supposed to google candidates to see what they looked like? Should we have tried to guess a candidate’s ethnicity and figure that into our decision? Were we expected to call references and ask what candidates are? I’m not being disingenuous. I didn’t know what we could do and what we couldn’t. And I wasn’t alone.
Gasman’s piece does a good job at articulating the problems with the lack of diversity in higher education. Again, read the piece to get the sense of her complete argument. Here are the five reasons in short form:
1) the word ‘quality’ is used to dismiss people of color who are otherwise competitive for faculty positions. Even those people on search committees that appear to be dedicated to access and equity will point to ‘quality’ or lack of ‘quality’ as a reason for not hiring a person of color.
2) the most common excuse I hear is ‘there aren’t enough people of color in the faculty pipeline.’
3) I have learned that faculty will bend rules, knock down walls, and build bridges to hire those they really want (often white colleagues) but when it comes to hiring faculty of color, they have to ‘play by the rules’ and get angry when any exceptions are made.
4) faculty search committees are part of the problem. They are not trained in recruitment, are rarely diverse in makeup, and are often more interested in hiring people just like them rather than expanding the diversity of their department.
5) if majority colleges and universities are truly serious about increasing faculty diversity, why don’t they visit Minority Serving Institutions – institutions with great student and faculty diversity – and ask them how they recruit a diverse faculty.
On the first three reasons, I’ll say she might be right but this is all impossible to demonstrate. I know our failed search committee was actively looking for diversity, but we were trying to do so in an ethical framework, as we understood it. We picked a candidate who happened to be white. We felt like the pool lacked diversity but what could we do about that? We had been handed the pool of applicants; we had nothing to do with the formation of the pool. We didn’t bend any rules, break down any walls, to pick the white guy. In fact, I was conflicted about voting for the white guy because he was white.
Where Gasman is really right is in reasons #4 and #5. I didn’t understand this before the failed search but I get it now. Our search committee was set up to fail. We were not trained on diversity and the hiring process. The people that ran the job ad were not trained. We had no fucking clue.
What still upsets me is that the committee was allowed to go through the whole process (read we spent hours and hours on this) only to have all our work voided out by a Dean who had given us no guidance in the first place. The English faculty wanted diversity. We just didn’t know how to get it.
I don’t know what to say now. I could pivot to a larger argument about diversity and racism, but I don’t know enough. Let’s face it: I’m a white guy. I’ve always been a white guy, and I really don’t understand how it feels to not be a white guy. I do know I felt pretty shitty about my experience on that hiring committee. I like Gasman’s article because it highlights some real problems, but I also think the article is a little naïve too when it comes to how these things play out in real time.
The article also ignores the diversity among institutions. Gasman discuss academia like all institutions are the same. Gasman works at University of Pennsylvania. That’s a very different place than a small regional university in the south. But I digress.
When it comes to the failed search, I believe the institution failed us. And the candidates we brought to campus who believed they really might get a job. And it failed our first choice who didn’t get the job because he was white.
