‘People Like Us’

I received a couple of private responses to my last entry on the efforts of Iowa’s private colleges and universities to strengthen recruitment of diverse faculty members. I’m grateful for those responses and appreciate the ideas and suggestions from my correspondents.

One mentioned the tendency of search committees to eliminate or give lesser consideration to diverse candidates because the committee members are more comfortable with colleagues who are like themselves. This is a concern often expressed when recruiting diverse faculty members is discussed. For one thing, it calls into question another truism of faculty recruitment, which is that there aren’t that many strong multicultural candidates to be had, particularly in fields that are not grossly overproducing Ph.D.’s.

There is a lot of truth in the point that search committees often tend to gravitate towards candidates who resemble current faculty members. There are good and bad reasons for this tendency. The primary good reason is that search committees comprise successful faculty members at an institution, and that a resemblance to the members is therefore a (potentially) helpful indicator of candidates’ future there.

The primary bad reason is, unfortunately, a very big problem. An institution that endlessly replicates itself will lose opportunities to bring in new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new perspectives on the institution’s life and operations. Students lose because they don’t get to learn from these new perspectives, and faculty members lose because they miss, or actively avoid, the challenges of having colleagues around who don’t share their presuppositions. From an institutional standpoint, these are very bad outcomes.

One commenter wondered why bother to pursue diversity on a faculty at all. My institution, and those with which I am familiar, are all acutely aware of the need for students to be exposed to multiple perspectives, to meet and work with people different from themselves, and to have a more worldly experience than they may anticipate when they come to college in the first place.

These same goals apply to faculty hiring committees as well: How can we expect our students to stretch themselves, challenge their comfort zones, and face new ideas if faculty members won’t do it when they search for new colleagues?