As soon as Dr. Christine Riordan began her tenure as president of Adelphi University in 2015, she vocalized her commitment to tolerance, diversity and inclusion.
“Universities should be safe spaces for the exploration of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge–there is no place within the academy for acts, whether overt, subtle or unconscious–that marginalize any member of the community,” she said at the time.
These words became reality through new faculty hiring protocols at the private Long Island university. During last year’s recruitment process, Adelphi’s administration began conversations with faculty search committees, ultimately implementing more active search methods across all academic departments. After the first year of using these techniques, 12 of the 25 new hires are faculty of color. Administrators say this has never happened before at the university.
“There were so many faculty of color who were not being hired,” said Dr. Perry Greene, Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion at Adelphi. “Underrepresented faculty were not making their way into our ranks as robustly as they would have liked.”
According to Greene, qualified academics of color were not being hired at the same rate as their white counterparts.
Dr. Chris Storm, a professor of mathematics and the Associate Provost for Faculty Research and Advancement, worked with Greene to go beyond traditional faculty search methods. As the former chair of the mathematics and computer science department, Storm has led previous search committees.
When academic departments need to fill vacancies, Greene and Storm said that they typically post the job openings on websites such as Diverse and the Chronicle of Higher Education. While important, Greene and Storm refer to these conventions as passive hiring protocols.
