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Additional Guides and Research

We welcome suggestions for research articles and guides to include.

University Guides

Many colleges and universities have put together guides to support faculty hiring. Below are some we most admire.

Quick Guides

Research on Best Higher Education Hiring Practices

  • Dadas (2013) “Reaching the profession: The locations of the rhetoric and composition job market,” CCC, 2013.
    • “The phone interview’s implicit reliance on the auditory modality also surfaces issues of access. The assumption that everyone can comfortably navigate this format leads to the exclusion of some candidates.”
    • “…[the video interview] rekindles long-standing concerns about a person’s candidacy being unfairly influenced by his or her appearance.”
    • See also follow-up, for more ideas for better serving candidates with disabilities: “Interview practices as accessibility: The academic job market.”
  • Eagan, Kevin and Jason Garvey (2015). “Stressing out: Connecting race, gender, and stress with faculty productivity,” Journal of Higher Education.
    • “…the small proportions of faculty of color on college and university campuses make them more vulnerable to frequent requests for service and committee responsibilities.”
    • “We found that, among faculty of color, feeling greater stress due to subtle discrimination significantly correlated with reduced research productivity.”
  • Lubienski, Miller & Saclarides. (2017). Sex differences in doctoral student publication rates. Educational Researcher. 47 (1).
    • Male doctoral students have been found to publish articles and submit articles for publication at a higher rate than female doctoral students. This was found to occur in both heavily male-dominated fields as well as fields not dominated by men. Studies found that childcare issues and family responsibilities were more of a hindrance to women’s performance.
    • While this difference has frequently been attributed to gender bias within university programs, this effect was found to occur in both male-dominated and non male-dominated fields.
  • Matthew, Patricia, ed (2016). Written/Unwritten: Diversity & the hidden truth of tenure. UNC Press
    • With over 25 chapters authored by academics of color from a variety or colleges and universities and at various points in their career, Written/Unwritten gives readers insights onto the experiences of faculty of color.
    • Marybeth Gasman, in her review for Women’s Review of Books writes, “Written/Unwritten is an important book. It should be read by anyone considering the professoriate, whether or not they are a person of color and no matter what their discipline, not only to gain a full understanding of faculty of color, but to understand whites’ role.”
  • Milkman, Akinola & Chugh (2015). What happens before? A field experiment exploring how pay and representation differentially shape bias on the pathway into organizationsJournal of Applied Psychology. 100 (6): 1678-1712.
    • large scale experimental study involving 6500 professors, 90 disciplines, and 259 institutions, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students with names that signaled gender and race, but with otherwise identical messages.  Researchers found that faculty were significantly more responsive to white males requests for mentoring than to requests from all other categories of students.
  • Muradoglu et al (2021).  In an article highlighted in Inside HigherEd, “Women–particularly underrepresented minority women–and early career academics feel like imposters in fields that value brilliance,” researchers findings, well summarized in this title, are based on the participation of over 4,000 academics recruited from nine research-intensive universities.  Authors conclude with a recommendation for field leadership (notably, not those who experience impostor feelings): “Fields that value brilliance as the key to success would be well served by reshaping their narrative on how to succeed. Focusing on the institutional and climate-related factors that are associated with impostor feelings is an important step toward improving people’s experiences in academia.”
  • O’Meara, Culpepper & Templeton (2020). Nudging toward diversity: Applying behavioral design to faculty hiring. Review of Educational Research, 90 (3): 311-48.
    • Hiring under-represented faculty of color has been found to be more likely when job descriptions include qualifications such as ‘experience in community outreach in multi-cultural settings,’ specification of a subdiscipline focused on diversity, highlighting of interdisciplinarity, explicit valuing of teaching and mentoring, and demonstration of attunement to the diversity climate (320-1).
    • Passive outreach practices — posting on a disciplinary website — facilitate bias, whereas active recruitment strategies mitigate bias, particularly since committees often believe that there are few diverse candidates available, even without pursuing disciplinary data that investigates this belief.
    • “Many institutions attempt to raise the issue of using institutional prestige as a proxy for quality by urging search committees to examine the work of the candidate” directly.
  • Sensory & Dinagelo (2017). ‘We are all for diversity, but…’: How faculty hiring committees reproduce whiteness and practical suggestions for how they can change. Harvard Educational Review.
    • “Despite stated commitments to diversity, predominantly White academic institutions still have not increased racial diversity among their faculty…. [Authors] analyze a typical faculty hiring scenario and identify the most common practices that block the hiring of diverse faculty and protect Whiteness and offer constructive alternative practices….”.
  • Stout, R., Archie, C., Cross, D., & Carman, C. A. (2018). The relationship between faculty diversity and graduation rates in higher education. Intercultural Education 29 (3): 399-417.
    • This study examines the relationship between faculty racial/ethnic diversity and graduation rates of undergraduate students, in particular those from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority populations. Using IPEDS data, the researchers calculated a Diversity Score for each institution. Findings suggest U.S. faculty diversity is lower than in the U.S. national population. Overall graduation rates for underrepresented minority students of all races/ethnicities are positively affected by increased diversity of their faculty.
  • Tierney & Salee (2008). “Do organizational structures increase faculty diversity? A cultural analysis.” ACADEME.
    • “Rather than a singular structural act — . a diversity office — a cultural response assumes that organizational effectiveness occurs through a myriad of actions on a daily and long-term basis. In this light, simply waiting until the labor pool increases, or arguing that a structural or strategic change is a magic bullet, is insufficient.”
    • “If a department simply hires faculty to replace departing professors, the result is replication, rather than transformation.”
    • Retention strategies must follow retention: “58% of new underrepresented minority faculty hires served to replace departing faculty of color… [due to] many faculty of color leav[ing[ their campuses in search of friendlier environments”
  • Whitaker, Montgomery & Martinez Acosta (2015). “Retention of Underrepresented Minority Faculty: Strategic Initiatives for Institutional Value Proposition Based on Perspectives from a Range of Institutions.Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education.
    • “Academic institutions must directly address issues of micro-inequities and intrinsic biases that arise from or give rise to many of these barriers, along with the subtle messages of personalized devaluation conveyed to URM faculty in predominantly white institutions (PWIs).”
    • “One of the most effective methods for promoting retention among URMs is the provision of mentoring and support systems. In fact, numerous studies have shown mentoring to be an effective way to recruit, retain and promote the advancement of faculty, and that the absence of, or inadequate, formal mentoring has disproportionately negative effects on women and faculty of color.”
    • “Even when a URM individual is successfully recruited to a PWI environment, many institutions then relax efforts to recruit and retain additional URM faculty …. This person then becomes the token representative…, routinely saddled with multiple committees and URM student recruitment and mentoring assignments, none of which are adequately rewarded or become a major factor in performance or promotion and tenure evaluations.”

Articles from The Chronicle and Other Higher Education News Sources

  • ‘No One Escapes Without Scars’: Being a Black Academic in America.” Chronicle Review, 18 April 2019.
    • In the wake of the “Operations Varsity Blues” bribery scandal, the Chronicle published reactions to the scandal from African American graduate students, junior professors, and senior scholars who reflect on what it’s like to be an African-American academic today.
  • Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education.  Section of the ACE (American Council on Education) website focused on news, statistics and efforts to address equity gaps in higher education.
  • Petit, Emma. “When Faculty of Color Feel Isolated, Consortia Expand Their Networks.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 Oct 2019.
    • “Research has shown that the cards are often stacked against academics of color: They face student evaluations rife with racial bias, higher expectations of ‘invisible labor’ like diversity and inclusion work, microaggressions, and outright discrimination.”
    • Describes FOCUS, a program that brings new assistant faculty of color together from several universities to provide support during the pretenure years.

Updated 8.9.21