5 Ways to Make a Real Improvement in Hiring Black Professors

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Black students, professors, and staff members heard many messages of support and solidarity from colleges and universities. Many of us perceived those statements as inauthentic and performative as they were rarely adjoined with any meaningful action — like, say, reversing the decades-long failure to hire and promote Black academics on the tenure track.

For years that has been one of the most important and recurrent demands of Black students. They want to engage in the classroom and know that — at some point — they can see someone who looks like them, reflects their experiences, and truly cares about their success.

At San Diego State University, we had 25 tenured and tenure-track Black faculty members in the fall of 2017. This fall, thanks to significant policy and process changes and cross-divisional partnerships, we have 42 — a 68-percent increase in a span of only four years. Since the summer of 2020, we’ve hired nine Black faculty members in academic departments. An additional three hires have faculty status but are in student-affairs offices (such as counseling and campus cultural centers).

In four short years, we have made important and noticeable improvements in the Black community on our campus. These faculty members are introducing new courses, overseeing student-retention and -success programs, and offering our students crucial and much-needed one-on-one connections. Certainly we have more to do, but we’ve laid the foundation to ensure that the number of Black faculty members at the university will continue to rise over time.

How did we do it? Here are some strategies we used and lessons learned along the way.

Strategy No. 1: Cluster hiring. After the murder of George Floyd, the university committed to a cluster hire of five faculty members who had a demonstrated record of success in research, teaching, or service focused on Black populations. We ended up hiring nine, despite the financial crunch caused by Covid-19.

To accomplish this goal, we prioritized replacement hires — i.e., a department that had lost a faculty member (due to a retirement, for example) could compete for one of the cluster-hire positions to replace its lost colleague. This provided an incentive to departments and also helped us accomplish our hiring goal while keeping within our budget.

Cluster hiring is an effective way to make large gains in diversity hiring much more quickly than would normally be accomplished. Our campus is planning two additional diversity-related cluster hires, one of which will focus on public-facing, border, or Indigenous scholarship.

Strategy No. 2: Search-process changes. Several years ago, supported by the University Senate, we modified our search process in key ways:

• First, we began bias training for all faculty-search committees, focused on the influence of implicit bias and microaggressions. Our own research faculty members, who specialized in these areas, led the training sessions, which are ongoing. This, in turn, has translated to greater buy-in from those who may have been initially skeptical about the efficacy of bias training.
• Second, we asked each faculty-search committee to certify that the diversity of their applicant pool reflected the diversity of doctoral-degree holders within the discipline. This provides a baseline for search-committee members who may have previously argued that “there are no people of color in my discipline.”
• Third, the University Senate required every academic department and college to construct a diversity plan in order to hire. The president put teeth behind the mandate: If a plan were not completed by a specified deadline, a department would not be approved to hire. These plans had to delineate strategies that hiring committees could use to recruit prospective candidates, retain diverse faculty members, and promote a climate of success for them. Moreover, a subsequent Senate resolution required all plans to offer specific practices to hire, retain, and promote Black faculty and staff members.
• Fourth, job candidates are now required to submit diversity statements with their application materials. This allows hiring committees to better understand each candidate’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to carry out Strategy No. 3.

Strategy No. 3: Search criteria. Among the most effective changes to the hiring process is our Building on Inclusive Excellence, or BIE, criteria. The eight criteria holistically assess the extent to which a candidate has a demonstrated record of teaching, research, or service focused on underrepresented populations. Examples of these criteria include whether the candidate:

• “Is committed to engaging in service with underrepresented populations within the discipline.”
• “Has experience or has demonstrated commitment to teaching and mentoring underrepresented students.”
• “Has research interests that contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education.”

These criteria are now required of all searches. To be hired, candidates must satisfy at least two to three of the eight criteria — depending on the college. This is how it works: Departments conduct a typical search but must include the eight criteria in their job ads. Once a search committee has identified its three to four finalists, a separate university-level faculty committee reviews those finalists against the BIE criteria.

Candidates must satisfy the criteria before they are invited to be finalists. If they don’t, the candidate is rejected, and the department has an opportunity to appeal with more information and/or submit an alternative candidate. The BIE criteria is the long-term game changer for ensuring that the faculty landscape is more reflective of our student population.

Strategy No. 4: Student engagement. One of the most important ways a campus can convey its commitment to diverse students is to involve them in the hiring process. Admittedly, this is where we initially had to course-correct midstream with our African American cluster hire. Black students at the university, while pleased with the effort, also wanted to be involved in the hiring process. While our collective-bargaining agreement did not allow for students to be voting members of a hiring committee, we identified numerous avenues for their meaningful participation:

• Attend committee meetings as nonvoting members.
• Participate in committee discussion of candidates.
• Attend job talks and teaching demonstrations.
• Participate in interviews with opportunities to ask questions.
• Participate at social events for candidates and in all aspects of the “campus visit.”
• Have read-only access to candidate dossier materials.
• Develop hiring recommendations to provide to the committee and/or dean.

This proved to be one of the most effective mechanisms of accountability because the students were able to weigh in on decisions and offer perspectives that others simply could not.

Strategy No. 5: Inclusion representatives. Another strategy many institutions use is having “inclusion representatives” on search committees. An inclusion representative is a trained diversity professional who can reinforce the committee’s training on watching out for implicit bias and microaggressions. For example, it is common for search-committee members to use vague words such as “likeable,” “fit,” and “resonate” to describe candidates who come from the same racial, ethnic, and gender groups as their own. Moreover, it is also common for committee members to disqualify diverse candidates by using certain phrases — such as, “I don’t think Candidate A would come here,” or, “If hired, Candidate B won’t stay.”

Bias is a core component of the human condition. An inclusion representative is trained to use questions to help committees probe further into the rationales that undergird biased decision-making. Also, having such a representative on a hiring committee is a visible reminder of the importance of maintaining the integrity of the search process.

This has been a campuswide effort. It takes a committed, cross-divisional team with a unified vision to make real changes in hiring. But hiring is just the first stage. Recruiting diverse faculty members and retaining them are two sides of the same coin. We’ll be working hard on that, too.