What It Will Take for Missouri to Meet Its Faculty-Diversity Goal

The University of Missouri at Columbia this week announced a goal of doubling its percentage of faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next four years, to 13.4 percent.

The university, which was rocked last year by student protests of race relations, has added $600,000 to a fund for the recruitment and retention of a diverse faculty, increasing the budget to nearly $1.4 million. It has also set aside $1 million to recruit more minority postdoctoral fellows, with the hope of hiring them in two years. It’s part of a broader, multimillion-dollar effort to improve diversity and inclusion on the flagship campus.

Diversity experts admire Missouri’s ambition but say a number of challenges lie ahead. They include providing sufficient funds to support the postdocs and new hires, fostering a campus climate that supports diversity, and getting buy-in from the departments that actually do the hiring.

“I don’t think the four-year attraction-and-hiring goal is unrealistic. But if in those four years they are not laying the groundwork in departments to build cultural competency, no matter who they hire, they’re not going to stay,” says Cris Clifford Cullinan, co-chair of the National Advisory Council for the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, and a consultant to colleges on diversity issues.

Higher education is littered with grand diversity plans and limited successes. Nationally, about 5 percent of full-time faculty members are black, 4 percent are Hispanic, and less than 1 percent are Native American. Those numbers have not changed much in recent years. Last fall Concerned Student 1950, an activist group on the Columbia campus, called for an increase in black faculty members to 10 percent, up from 3.2 percent.

A Complex Challenge

Part of the challenge, experts say, is that hiring for diversity is often viewed as an add-on, not part of a campus’s mission. Meanwhile, administrators who champion ambitious hiring goals move on, or turn their attention to other pressing issues. Yale this year released a scathing internal review describing decades of failed attempts at achieving bold faculty-diversity goals. Other elite institutions, including Brown and Columbia Universities, are pumping millions of dollars into programs designed to improve on past efforts to hire a more diverse faculty.

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For Missouri the challenge is particularly complex. It doesn’t have the deep pockets of those wealthier institutions, and it is still recovering from months of campus turmoil, including the departure of the Columbia chancellor and the system president.

The new hiring effort was announced on Tuesday during a news conference with campus and system administrators to discuss progress on diversity and inclusion plans. Kevin G. McDonald, the system’s new chief diversity officer, called the doubling of black, Hispanic, Native American, and other underrepresented faculty members an “aspirational goal.” In addition to the hiring plan, Missouri is undertaking surveys of campus climate and diversity, and conducting diversity training for search-committee members and students. It is spending about $4.2 million on those and other efforts to improve diversity and inclusion.

Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at Missouri and chair of the Faculty Council, says faculty members are already working with the administration to put “flesh on the bones” of the announcement. While it remains to be seen whether the campus can double the percentage of minority faculty members, he says the university is moving in the right direction, by hiring Mr. McDonald and bringing in other experienced leaders on diversity.

“There is a tremendous willingness among people on the faculty here to work on these issues,” he says. He hopes the university can find more money to expand the postdoctoral-fellows fund — which right now is a one-time investment — and more resources to mentor underrepresented faculty members. And there needs to be further frank talk, he says, about race on the campus.

How to Improve the Climate

Despite the university’s very public challenges, scholars from minority groups won’t necessarily avoid Missouri because of its past turmoil, says Richard J. Reddick, assistant vice president for research and policy in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. “Most underrepresented faculty understand that we’re talking about an American issue, not necessarily a Missouri-specific issue,” he says. “I can go to almost any other predominantly white institution and find campus-climate issues.”

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Mr. Reddick says he’s been impressed with the holistic approach that Mr. McDonald, who took office this summer, has taken. “Some of the things he’s been doing have been very best-practice,” Mr. Reddick says, such as doing a climate assessment and talking to campus groups to find out where the problems may be. Mr. McDonald came from the Rochester Institute of Technology, which has had significant success in diversifying its faculty.

Administrators on campuses with strategic-diversity plans say they require a multifaceted approach. The University of Maryland-Baltimore County, for example, has created a “whole spectrum” of programs, says Philip Rous, the provost. That includes monitoring the faculty-hiring process to measure the diversity of candidate pools, training faculty members on the problems of unconscious bias, and creating postdoctoral fellowships to broaden the pool of applicants from underrepresented groups.

“It has to be embedded across the entire process,” says Mr. Rous. Even then, he notes, it’s slow going. About 12 percent of tenured and tenure-track faculty members at UMBC come from underrepresented groups.

Turmoil at Mizzou

In 2015, student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, in Columbia, and spawned a wave of similar unrest at colleges across the country. Read more Chronicle coverage of the turmoil in Missouri and its aftermath.

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Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, director of postdoctoral affairs in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, runs one of the oldest programs in the country designed to prepare minority postdocs for faculty careers. The university brings in five or six such scholars annually for a two-year fellowship, and spends about $60,000 per fellow each year to cover stipends, conference travel, and research funds.

But that pot of money is just one piece of the puzzle, Ms. Anderson-Thompkins says. Departments that want to hire their fellows can apply to a fund run by the provost’s office that pays the first four years’ salary of a new hire. “If we didn’t have that dedicated funding from the provost’s office, it would be a revolving door of people coming in and leaving,” she says.

Even with that incentive, UNC has hired only about half of its fellows since 2006, although she says the others go on to good jobs elsewhere. Departments must be ready to recruit scholars whom they can mentor, hire, and help work toward tenure, she adds.

“Oftentimes institutions have this great vision, but it takes a tremendous amount of resources to invest in this initiative,” says Ms. Anderson-Thompkins.

A ‘Great Goal’

Missouri could be stretched to find the money to keep offering its postdoctoral-fellows program, which will bring in three to four fellows annually. The university has been challenged by a decline in enrollments this fall, leading to a revenue shortfall. A spokesman for the system says the new money announced this week came from the system’s intellectual-property revenue, which officials hope to eventually institutionalize.

Ms. Anderson-Thompkins echoes something that Ms. Cullinan, the diversity consultant, says is often a problem in diversity hiring: that minority candidates are sometimes expected to “solve your diversity problem.” Instead, all faculty members should be thinking about those issues.

Stephanie Shonekan, an associate professor and chair of the black-studies department at Mizzou, says she sees a real effort across the campus to discuss climate issues. “That’s one thing we should all be really grateful to our students for, for raising the level of discourse for contemporary issues of race and racism and implicit bias,” she says.

Ms. Shonekan, who has worked with Mr. McDonald’s division on inclusion, diversity, and equity to create a diversity program for incoming freshmen and transfer students, calls the hiring plan a “great goal” and the funding significant. It’s important not only to hire faculty members with different perspectives and research interests, she says, but also to put professors from underrepresented groups at the front of the classroom for all students to learn from.

“You make your goals, and you hope you reach them,” she says. Either way, “it’s a clear message that in every search we do, there needs to be some focus on bringing in people of color.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.