"What are you doing about diversity?"
Everyone who asked me that question when I was a department chairman seemed to have an agenda. Walter Younger (all of the names in this column are pseudonyms) headed the campus committee on diversity, and when he asked me that question, he was looking into hiring practices in my department.
"For example," he continued, "would you hire a white guy to teach African-American literature?" I was tempted to reply, "I'd rather hire a white woman." But Younger was in no mood for jokes, so I opted for the more neutral, "Yes, if he was the best candidate for the position." Was that the answer he wanted to hear? I wasn't sure.
Another time, a senior faculty member in my department suggested that I argue for Joe Lampton's tenure by stressing Lampton's working-class background: "He's first-generation college, you know." Social class certainly comes under the heading of diversity, but in writing up the promotion papers I focused on Lampton's accomplishments, not his origins. Lampton got his promotion.
Diversity is important on my campus. Recent chancellors and provosts have regularly urged departments to hire female and minority scholars. Each year department heads report the racial and gender makeup of their faculties to the administration. Likewise, diversity is important in my department, where we have a faculty varied in race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.
Even so, every time we run a search we have to prove to the campus that we really are an equal-opportunity employer. Here's how that works:
Department heads need the dean's authorization to begin a search, but they must also get approval from the affirmative-action office before they can advertise the position. The affirmative-action procedures were put in place to ensure a broad range of applicants for each search, and to remind hiring committees that applicants must be treated fairly. It's a two-step process, with three levels of review at each step.
First, department heads and their search committees prepare a job ad carrying the familiar but important language about affirmative action and equal opportunity. After the department's affirmative-action officer approves our search proposal, it gets reviewed by affirmative-action officers at the college and at the campus levels.
Sometimes those officers suggest changes in the ad. Once I was asked to relax our requirement of a completed Ph.D. because it might discourage some applicants. But we had never hired anyone who wasn't on track to finish the dissertation on time, so the Ph.D. requirement stayed.
Another time I was asked to advertise in a journal that was not in our field. I agreed to place that ad, but only if someone else paid for it. The ad appeared, but we got the bill anyway. Even with the inevitable questions that arise during three levels of preliminary review, the affirmative-action procedures were never an obstacle. Our ads were always approved in a week.
The second affirmative-action review kicks in once a search is complete, but before the dean has offered anyone the job. For that stage I prepared a narrative detailing our search procedures and reporting on the diversity of the applicants. In the narrative I described how the hiring committee reached its decisions and why our first choice was more qualified than the others.
In addition, I reported the number of female and minority applicants. It was usually possible to identify women by their first names. For candidates with gender-neutral or unfamiliar names, I scanned letters of reference for tell-tale pronouns. In English, women make up a strong percentage of the candidate pool, but minority scholars do not. I could only count candidates if they had identified themselves as such, but unless we were advertising a position in a subfield of minority literature, there were not a lot of self-identified minority candidates among our applicants.
The search narrative also requires a tally of the female and minority candidates whom we interviewed. I had to present a ranked list of the finalists who would be offered the position should our first choice decline; what their qualifications were; and why the other finalists were not hirable.
I usually wrote a short paragraph for each person on our "affirmative-action list" -- those who might be offered the job. And I wrote no more than a sentence for each one whose interview was unsuccessful. Final affirmative-action approval always came quickly. It never stood in the way of our making an offer.
Affirmative-action processes proved easy, but actual minority hiring could be difficult, because the number of candidates was small and competition for them was intense.
During my six years as chairman, we offered positions to 11 African-American and 2 Hispanic scholars, but only 4 of them accepted. We boast competitive salaries, excellent research opportunities, and good working conditions, but the candidates we lost either went to up-market institutions or they opted for location, usually big cities, oceans, or mountains: No one comes to central Illinois for the climate, the scenery, or the shopping.
In my department, a diverse faculty and a diverse curriculum often overlap, and many of us are involved in interdisciplinary programs that focus on teaching and studying diversity. Even before I became chairman, I joined a university task force charged with setting up an Asian-American studies program.
That program came about because Asian-American students, despite being better represented on the campus than in the state's population, felt underrepresented in the curriculum. They wanted a program to parallel existing ones in African-American studies, Latino/Latina studies, and women's studies.
Hiring someone to teach Asian-American literature presented another opportunity to make visible the invisible. When I first brought the idea to the department's faculty members, some were skeptical. Seth Mandel, a senior Americanist, wanted to know what "Asian-American literature" actually was. "Isn't there already an Asian-studies program students can go to?" he asked.
I proceeded to describe the corpus of Asian-American poetry, fiction, drama, and film. There were courses in Asian-American literature at English departments all over the country, and I pointed to well-established graduate programs in the field at prestigious universities on both coasts. Some of those programs came about only after students took over buildings or chained themselves to gates. And no, I added, Asian studies could not be an appropriate substitute for Asian-American studies.
Barbara Gugelstein wanted to know how wise it was to devote an entire faculty position to that field when the department had more pressing needs. I explained that receiving one of the new program's first two faculty slots was a perk that I had lobbied to secure. The new hire would be a bonus. We would still honor our priority list, I argued.
I had always known our department to be eager to pioneer new areas of study. Asian-American studies was an emerging field and we needed to become a player in it. It should have been on our priority list already. In the end, the faculty supported the search.
It was challenging to hire in Asian-American literature because the pool of candidates was still small and because the field's top practitioners had a preference for California and the Northeast. We managed to recruit our first choice in that search. But after two years she succumbed to the lure of the West Coast.
There was no question that we would search again, and even though it eventually took another two years to find the right candidate, the department approached the task without questioning the field's validity the second time around.
In asking me who should be teaching ethnic studies, Walter Younger had raised the perennial question of identity: Must you be what you teach? The answer I always arrive at is, No. But when it comes to joint appointments between English and the various ethnic-studies programs, there's certainly pressure to find faculty members whose heritage matches the program's focus, particularly if such faculty members are underrepresented on campus.
Diversity in hiring and in the curriculum are both desirable, and while they are sometimes linked, they don't have to be. My department has male faculty members specializing in women writers and female faculty members specializing in what has come to be tagged the literature of dead white men.
True, our African literature specialist is from Ghana, and our Asian Americanists have roots in China and India. But we also have instructors of various backgrounds who don't teach anything related to their race or ethnicity, and we have a rainbow coalition of faculty members who do research and teach minority literatures, languages, and cultures.
Some departments don't face that identity problem: There's no such thing as African-American chemistry or Latina math. But diversity in hiring can be problematic for engineering and the physical sciences because those disciplines don't yet have the numbers of female and minority scholars that are found in other fields. And those departments have to compete for top talent against better-paying jobs in the private sector.
When we hire in any area of English, we're looking for the best candidate, intellectually, not the best candidate of a particular ancestry, skin tone, or gender. Still, there is an expectation among many students, and sometimes among faculty members and administrators, that minority studies will be taught by professors of color; that women's studies will be taught by women; that gay and lesbian literature will be taught by gay men and lesbians.
We have black students in our graduate program, but no one assumes they will specialize in minority literatures. Two recent graduate students -- one Asian and one white -- wrote dissertations on African-American literature, and although both got jobs, they both met resistance from some search committees when they turned up for interviews because they weren't black.
Walter Younger, who came back with his committee to ask me more about my department's diversity record, wasn't surprised when I told him that. Then he asked me, would I hire a mediocre minority candidate as a freebie, maybe because another department really wanted to hire that person's partner?
That's a tempting offer, I replied, and turning it down could generate a lot of ill will. But the provost always insists that we hire people who will move the department's center of gravity forward. Certainly in Younger's hypothetical case I'd make no snap judgments, and I'd go through normal department procedures.
We always stand ready to help faculty members succeed, I told him, but it would be no favor to the candidate, the partner, the department, or the institution to hire someone who would ultimately lag behind the rest of the faculty, or even fail to get tenure. That's no way to achieve diversity, and that's not what our affirmative-action procedures promote.
Younger had on his poker face, but I guess that was the answer the diversity committee was looking for, because after that meeting I didn't hear from the panel again.
