It is no secret that the demographic makeup of students enrolled in American colleges and universities today is far more diverse than in prior eras. According to the most recent Digest of Education Statistics, White students accounted for 82.1 percent of undergraduates in 1976 yet represented 53.8 percent of the student enrollment four decades later. This shift has been counterbalanced with a growing diversity of students, particularly those of Latinx descent, who grew from 3.7 percent to 18.7 percent in this same time frame.
The growth in student diversity has been adjoined with an alphabet soup of essential federal designations for minority serving institutions such as Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs), predominantly Black institutions (PBIs) and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions (AANAPISIs).
In contrast, the representation of diversity within the professoriate is disproportionately White. Roughly speaking, for every one White faculty member there are 16 White students. In contrast, for every one Black and Latinx faculty member there are 49 Black students and 84 Latinx students, respectively. These data have direct implications for student advising, same-race role models, mentorship, cultural relevance and, ultimately, student success.
Given this, diversifying the faculty remains one of the most central challenges facing American higher education today. This is not to say that White faculty cannot be successful with students of color. However, it is certainly important for students to see people who look like them at some point in their academic career. Fortunately, much has been written about strategies and practices that can promote a more robust applicant pool and a fairer selection process.
Many institutions continue to employ the Association of American Colleges and Universities guidebook on Diversifying the Faculty. Written by Dr. Caroline Turner in 2002, this resource still provides relevant recommendations for search committees to consider before, during and after the search to recruit and retain minoritized faculty. Some of the most critical recommendations include advertising in diverse outlets (like DiverseJobs), ensuring that the search committee is diverse and employing inclusive language on job descriptions. Additional insights can also be drawn from the works of innumerable scholars such as Christine Stanley, Frank Tuitt, Ben Baez, Daryl Smith and Barbara Johnson.
As a scholar who has also written on this topic and as a practitioner who has supported institutions in building strategies for addressing the paucity of diverse faculty, I believe that there are four key research-based strategies within the pantheon of recommendations that are basic building blocks for all institutions to enact.
Implicit Bias Training
