WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you hope to land a job as chief diversity officer at an institution of higher learning, don’t expect to impress the search committee strictly with your passion for boosting diversity on campus.
Instead, be able to discuss what the contemporary research says about best practices in the field and how those findings shape your view of the work at hand.
“In today’s context right now of higher education, anyone who’s going for a position like that has to have some sort of philosophy lens that’s forming their thinking around this topic,” said Sharon Fries-Britt, associate professor of higher education at the University of Maryland at College Park.
“There’s no excuse for someone to come through at that level and not have been thinking about diversity, even if not thinking about it directly,” said Fries-Britt, who chaired a search committee for her institution’s chief diversity officer, or CDO.
“We were looking for candidates that were able to give us that landscape.”
Fries-Britt shared her insights Tuesday during a panel discussion titled “Translating Diversity Scholarship into Diversity Practice.”
The discussion was one of several sessions conducted at the annual meeting of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, or NADOHE. The theme of the conference was, “Diversity Matters: Access and Inclusion, 2013 and Beyond.”
