For his dissertation, Dr. Daniel Blake originally planned to focus on interventions for first-generation students and students of color. But when his fiancée started applying to Ph.D. programs, he found himself on a personal research mission, looking for whatever data he could find on the recruitment and retention of academic couples of color.
“There was really no guarantee that she’d get into a program that was geographically convenient for us,” said Blake, a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting scholar at the Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice at Rutgers University. “While she was travelling for one of her Ph.D. interviews, I started reading about the topic. When I was looking at the literature, I saw there wasn’t that much research on it. It’s also dated – it’s not that contemporary – and thinking about us, I’m Black and she’s Latina. I didn’t really see any diverse couples in the research.”
Blake is now working to fill the gap. He authored a report based on his dissertation research, which was released on Wednesday, called “Dual-Career Hiring for Faculty Diversity: Insights from Diverse Academic Couples.”
Academic couples make up 36% of full-time faculty. Plus, a third of underrepresented minority faculty are partnered with fellow scholars, the report notes.
“For academic couples to comprise such a large part of the professoriate but for there not really to be that much research on them was surprising for me,” Blake said. “But that was also an opportunity for me at the same time.”
His report explores previous scholarship on academic couples, focusing on two national studies, and shares his own findings from interviews with 11 minority faculty couples about their experiences finding positions at the same university through a dual-career hiring process.
It emphasizes that universities frame these kinds of hires as a way to diversify their faculty, and in theory, it could work. Welcoming two scholars of color, especially into the same department, “can definitely bolster diversity in a big way,” Blake said. But in practice, it’s unclear if universities are living up to their goal.
