Yale University’s plan to spend $50 million to diversify its faculty over the next five years has pleased professors on the campus who say the investment is a critical step forward. What remains to be seen is the extent to which money — even a substantial amount — can create such diversity.
The eye-catching amount includes $25 million from Yale’s faculty-development fund, which will match the money provided by individual schools to support salaries for new hires over three years. The money will also pay half of the salaries of up to 10 visiting professors each year.
The plan is, in many ways, “a continuation of what we’ve done in the past,” said Richard G. Bribiescas, deputy provost for faculty development and diversity and a professor of anthropology. “You really can’t reaffirm a commitment without showing that there are some resources behind this.”
Many parts of the new effort were already underway, Mr. Bribiescas said, such as a push to improve the academic pipeline for scholars from underrepresented groups by increasing support for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Now those tactics will simply become more formalized, he said.
Still, several faculty members said they were surprised by the announcement. Jacqueline Goldsby, chair of the department of African-American studies, had “no idea this was coming down the pike.”
But Ms. Goldsby said she was encouraged by the $50-million commitment. That level of funding signals dedication from Yale’s leaders to tackle a crucial problem, she said, and it puts the university ahead of many of its peers on faculty diversity. “So many of my colleagues have been laboring for this kind of commitment for decades,” she said.
‘It’s something everyone cares about but takes real resources to get done.’
Targeting diversity with substantial funding is “tremendous,” said Frances M. Rosenbluth, a political-science professor who was formerly deputy provost for faculty development and diversity. Otherwise, it is difficult to make faculty-diversity efforts concrete, she said, because “it’s something everyone cares about but takes real resources to get done.”
Yale has learned that from several prior efforts to increase the number of women and racial minorities on its faculty. The most recent such effort, which set out quantitative goals for new hires, concluded two years ago with mixed results. While the university hired 86 professors in underrepresented groups from 2006 to 2011, more than half of those faculty members had left the campus by November 2011. (Yale officials said the campaign had been stalled by the recession.)
This time around, Mr. Bribiescas said, some of Yale’s strategies will change. He cited one goal in particular: bringing more visiting professors to the campus. “We want to expose more scholars to the Yale experience,” he said.
Improving the pipeline is the most important objective of the new effort, Ms. Rosenbluth said. It’s also the hardest because “it has the least direct benefits to Yale.” Some graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who take advantage of Yale’s ramped-up support and mentoring will eventually take positions at other colleges. In a sense, though, Yale would be providing a public good for institutions that don’t have as many resources as it does, she said.
Concerns About Climate
In trying to attract more-diverse scholars to its ranks, Yale may be able to draw lessons from other elite institutions that have made major pledges. Columbia University set aside $30 million in 2012 for a faculty-diversification effort, and so far 30 female and minority scholars have committed to joining the faculty. Officials there announced in April that they would add $33 million to that fund.
The University of Pennsylvania committed $100 million over five years in 2011. Anita L. Allen, a law and philosophy professor who is Penn’s vice provost for faculty, said departments’ audits of their spending on faculty diversity had revealed that the university is on track to spend more than $100 million by next year.
Where does all that money go? Penn has awarded several distinguished professorships to minority scholars, created additional predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships for aspiring academics from underrepresented groups, and funded more research on diversity-related topics. The university also began requiring that a senior faculty member serve as a diversity adviser on every search committee, Ms. Allen said.
The funding has yielded some tangible results: Women now make up nearly half of new hires, compared with 39 percent four years ago. And preliminary numbers indicate that, as of this year, 23 percent of faculty members are racial minorities, compared with less than one-fifth in 2011. “The overall percentage is pretty modest,” Ms. Allen said, though she pointed out that Penn’s faculty isn’t growing much over all, making the increase more meaningful.
‘No matter how much money there is, if you don’t create a climate that is supportive, diversity will not happen.’
Still, for institutions that spend big to diversify their faculties, hiring inclusively is only the first step, said Kathleen Wong(Lau), director of the National Conference for Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education. Money is important as “an accelerator” to “get the right people in place,” said Ms. Wong(Lau), who serves as a consultant for colleges on diversity. But “just because you are inclusive doesn’t mean you understand systemic inequities,” she said. “Institutional policies and practices need to change as well.”
Ms. Allen said Penn had also substantially increased the number of minorities in senior leadership positions. “No matter how much money there is, if you don’t create a climate that is supportive, diversity will not happen,” she said.
Some professors at Yale have criticized the university’s poor climate for minority and female faculty members, and they have called out Yale leaders and hiring committees for not doing enough. A poster put up on the campus last month drew attention to the much-higher representation of racial minorities among undergraduates than among professors. Tamar S. Gendler, dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said at the time that nearly a third of incoming faculty members at Yale in 2014-15 were members of racial minority groups.
Two faculty members affiliated with the African-American-studies department have said that the culture had contributed to their decision to leave Yale at the end of the academic year.
Ms. Goldsby, the department chair, said she could recall being one of the few women of color on the campus while working toward her Ph.D., in the 1990s, adding that she understood the concerns. She estimated that just a dozen of the 1,000 professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences were women of color. “That’s tough,” she said.
She believes that the climate for minority scholars at Yale has progressed over the last three decades. However, she said, a big obstacle remains: the university’s promotion structure. Associate professors there do not automatically receive tenure, but most female and minority faculty members that Yale would seek to hire are associate professors, with tenure, at other institutions. It isn’t easy to recruit them to a position that doesn’t offer the same job security, she said.
She said she hoped that conversations centered on reforming that process would begin as part of the diversity plan.
Ms. Goldsby also questions the logistics: How will individual departments develop strategies for hiring scholars from more-diverse backgrounds? How will the cost-sharing agreement for salaries work? “If the university is pledging to cover three years of recruited faculties’ salaries,” she asked, “what happens in Year 4, and all the years that come after?”
Mr. Bribiescas said he was aware that funding alone won’t buy diversity at Yale. “This plan is not simply, Here’s a bunch of money; go find faculty,” he said. The university intends to reform its search process and pay more attention to the faculty experience for women and minorities, he said.
“If faculty leave because they feel like they didn’t receive the proper mentoring, or if they feel that the climate in their department or school wasn’t encouraging,” he said, “those are things that we find completely unacceptable.”
Kate Stoltzfus contributed reporting to this article.
