Wed 18 Jan 2006
Whitney Wilson ‘90 provides these comments on Faculty sections of the Report, authored by John Gerry, Associate Dean of the Faculty.
The opening part of this section of the report lays out the Colleges’ rationale for wanting a diverse faculty. The articulated reasons mirror those generally laid out for wanting a diverse student body (i.e. a remedy for past discrimination, and the general benefits of a diversity of backgrounds and ideas). There has been plenty of debate on the merits of these reasons, and I won’t rehash those arguments now.
One of the most astonishing statements I saw in the report was in the section relating to faculty recruitment and was characterized as a “recommendation”:
Continue to allocate FTE to curricular areas in which we are likely to attract minority candidates. Critical to our recent success in bringing minorities onto the faculty has been that we have begun hiring into interdisciplinary programs (Latina/o Studies, American Studies, African American Studies).
This seems to suggest that Williams should be adding faculty positions to, at least in part, make it easier to add minority faculty. Does this make any sense? It might if there were a complete lack of minority faculty in Williamstown. But the statistics provided by the College in Tables 32-50 show generally that minority faculty are present at Williams in more than negligible numbers. I believe that most people in the Williams community would agree that one of the important components of a Williams education is the curriculum. It appears that the College is at least contemplating shaping that curriculum for the express purpose of adding diversity to the faculty. Regardless of one’s position on the importance of a (more) diverse faculty, I don’t believe that the curriculum should be affected by efforts to increase the number of minority faculty members.
One of the other recommendations - more recruiting from the ranks of Bolin Fellows - could and should be fully implemented. The advantage of doing so is that it allows for a much more informed picture of a prospective faculty member prior to hiring him or her. That is, the College has the opportunity has the opportunity to closely observe the candidate in the Williamstown environment for a year. ( I wonder whether making the fellowships two year positions - or perhaps renewable for a second year - would make sense. Certainly, many, if not most dissertations take at least two years or more to write). This should allow a much more informed judgment to be made about the strength of the candidate (particularly his or her teaching ability) that could possibly be evident from a short series of interviews. This type of extended “interview” is the model used by large law firms to fill their entry level positions from law students who intern at them for a summer. While I certainly won’t vouch for the overall hiring and retention practices of large law firms, this is one area where I think they have it right. Hiring Bolin Fellows would also allow faculty candidates a better opportunity to know what living in Williamstown would be like. This would, hopefully, make it less likely that good (in this case, minority) faculty members would leave because they didn’t want to live/work in Williamstown.
Finally, if we agree having a more diverse faculty is an important goal (or at least agree that the administration has decided that it is an important goal), one way to accomplish this is to take more chances in hiring. Based on the experiences of a friend who applied for an advertised position at Williams, it appears that “paper qualifications” are extremely important in the hiring process. While such qualifications can be a way to cull through dozens - or even hundreds - of applicants, it undoubtedly eliminates many candidates who might make excellent Williams professors. So long as the College is willing to not reappoint faculty at the end of their first three years, the downside of taking chances on minority faculty applicants who might flourish at Williams and be an asset to the Williams community is outweighed by the benefits.
Thanks to Whitney and all our discussants for taking the time to make such thoughtful comments.
6 Responses to “On Faculty Diversity”
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1) Whitney writes:
I would not want to be the department chair who has to fire a (minority or not) professor after three years who Williams took a chance on.
2) If you only read one part of the report, read this one. John Gerry does an amazing job of weaving together all sorts of data and interview materials. He provides a thorough and interesting picture of the problems Williams faces in getting the candidates it wants.
It is interesting to note that Gerry’s position, associate dean of the faculty, did not, I think, exist at Williams back in the day. On the one hand, no one wants to see the bureaucracy of the College continue to expand at its current topsy pace. Back in the day, the Dean of the Faculty himself, or another actual faculty member, would have done this work. On the other hand, Gerry’s work (at least what we see of it here) is of such high quality that it is tough to complain about another office in Hopkins Hall.
3) Whitney writes:
Exactly. This is one of the key aspects of the Report. See also Hu-DeHart’s comments. You can either hire more economists (of whatever color) to ensure that the faculty has enough teachers to teach the classes/majors that students want or you can hire more diversity-field specialists (most of whom will be a color other than white) to teach very small classes/majors that not many students are interested in.
You can’t do both.
In response to David’s point number (1), I agree that the prospect of increasing the number of faculty members who are not reappointed (much less the number of minority faculty members)is not a pleasant one, the altneratives are not attractive, either. The closer review of reappointment candidates would, of course, be applicable to all junior faculty memebers, not just minority ones, and would hopefully result in a better faculty (however defined). The College would have to go into this with its eyes open, however, and recognize that there could be some litigation stemming from such a policy. It would also have to back up the departments as they made those decisions. It seems to me that that meritless (hopefully) employment discrimination claims are a reasonable price to pay for a more diverse faculty (if you subscribe to the idea that more diversity is better/necessary).
I am skeptical about even closer review of reappointment candidates.
Williams is already extremely unusual among colleges for the relatively low percentage of tenure-track professors who receive tenure.
It might not matter much in a discipline like History where there are 10 PhDs for every job (disclaimer: i’m making up the number), but certainly in Mathematics Williams is looked upon less favorably by some very good candidates in part because they see they only have about a 50% chance of getting tenure.
If Williams wants to take more chances on faculty members, then I suggest they offer 2-3 year temporary postdoctoral positions, perhaps establishing a Bolin-like program for people who have gotten their PhDs. (See also the Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence.) This way, these temporary faculty leave without the stigma in the job market of having been denied reappointment or tenure. It is always possible to keep a small number of them (say 10%) when “a permanent position opens up”. The only disadvantage is that the applicant pool for these kinds of positions will generally have less experience. On the other hand, there might be some applicants who will apply for such a temporary job but not for a tenure-track job because they are willing to spend 2 years in Williamstown to learn from some of the best teachers around but are not willing to consider the possibility of spending their life in rural New England.
I am pretty sure that Mathematics is an extreme in this regard, but it would not suprise me if, out of the hundred or more applications for the job in math last year, there was not a single black or Hispanic applicant.
Out of 459 PhDs in mathematics and statistics granted to U.S citizens in 2003-2004, 13 went to African-Americans, and 13 to Hispanics. Out of the top 47 (NRC ranking) mathematics departments, whose graduates Williams is overwhelmingly likely to hire from, there were 3 African-Americans and 3 Hispanics out of 179 PhDs granted to U.S. citizens. (This data is from the AMS Annual Survey.)
Other colleges and universities want these black and Hispanic mathematicians, for the same reasons that Williams does, and the location of Williams (where a black faculty member could almost go a whole week without seeing another black person) is likely to be a significant disadvantage in recruiting these people.
The reality in some academic fields it that there are almost no minorities to hire. I am not sure those of you who don’t know the academic job market have grasped how hard it might be to hire minorities in some fields.
Is there a reason which should cause me to care?
I think that Whitney’s analysis got at what is (to me) the single most troubling element of the diversity report: that an (unspecified percentage of) faculty lines should be allocated on the basis of the skin color of the likely job recipient.
To give a concrete example, Marquette University this year implemented a quite extreme diversity policy, mandating that a minority candidate be among those interviewed for all faculty positions. The result: in History, the department decided to modify a proposed line in the history of US foreign relations to an emphasis on US immigration and ethnicity, believing (probably correctly) that more minority candidates would study the latter than the former. The department chair also expressed concern about how this policy will play out when the department needs to fill positions in German and Russian history, fields that it seems very few minority candidates study.
The long-term effect of this kind of policy (if sustained over a 12-15 year period) would be a dramatic transformation of the curriculum, as fields that (for whatever reason) minority candidates tended not to study would, over time, simply be dropped from the curriculum–such as, in the Marquette example, US foreign relations, German history, and Russian history.
That type of change might be a good thing (I obviously don’t think it is). But the diversity report should at least raise the point, and explain why such a curricular transformation will improve the overall quality of a Williams education.