During the past 10 years, Cornell University has made significant strides in recruiting underrepresented minorities and women in its faculty ranks, but a new internal study at the university is revealing that its success is a mixed bag.
The number of minority faculty has grown about 52 percent, and the number of female faculty members has increased more than 38 percent in the last decade, according to a 2008 report by Dr. Robert Harris Jr., the former vice provost for diversity and faculty development. “Things have not changed dramatically,” he says.
Dr. Zellman Warhaft, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who was commissioned last fall by the university’s provost to conduct a follow-up study on Cornell’s diversity recruitment and retention.
Warhaft is in the process of finishing the report, which includes interviews with faculty, findings from work/life surveys and previous faculty studies and recruitment and retention information from other schools. So far, Warhaft concludes that women and minorities still think that the campus climate is less favorable to them, based on initial feedback from e-mail surveys and in-person interviews.
However, overall, women perceive the environment at Cornell to be more favorable to them than do underrepresented minorities, says Warhaft, and that could be because they went from being 22 percent of the faculty in 2005 to 27 percent of the faculty in 2010. An initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to recruit more female STEM faculty members, the CU-ADVANCE Center, also seems to have struck a chord with female faculty on campus, he says.
The center works with 53 departments in STEM to avoid unconscious bias in recruiting, train search committees where to look for female faculty and teach people about how gender factors into interviews.
There also is a service called “coffee with the candidate” wherein a female faculty member is paired with a recruit who has a similar background or has had similar life experiences. “It’s kind of raising awareness [in the departments] of the pitfalls,” says the center’s executive director Yael Levitte.
