Retaining Diverse Faculty Members
Recruiting faculty members of color is a challenge that many colleges have been trying to solve for years. But some campuses are grappling with a new question: Once those faculty members are hired, how do you get them to stay?
That’s one of the questions the Advance program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is tackling.
The program started about 20 years ago with a grant from the National Science Foundation. At the time, the funding was meant to help women faculty members excel in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines. When the NSF grant ended in 2007, the university expanded the program to help retain faculty members from marginalized communities and all academic fields, said Jennifer Linderman, director of Advance and a professor of engineering.
Today, Advance researches recruitment, retention, climate, and leadership development for diverse faculty members at UM, and trains departments and colleges in its findings. When a unit or college is hiring, the hiring committee must work with an Advance committee that focuses on finding diverse, well-qualified candidates for faculty positions. Sometimes individual faculty members or leaders take workshops facilitated by the Advance program.
In the two decades since Advance began, UM has made incremental progress in diversifying its tenure-track faculty members, according to data compiled by Advance. In 2003, 27 percent were women; by 2018, that number had grown to 34 percent. (This figure includes women from marginalized groups and white women.) Underrepresented minority professors made up 9 percent of tenure-track faculty in 2003; by 2018, they made up 10 percent.
“We are a large institution,” wrote Linderman in an email. “There are areas where we have made great progress and areas where there has been more of a struggle.”
Learning From Exit Interviews
For about a decade, Advance has conducted exit interviews with faculty members of color, Linderman said. It’s not the standard human-resources work that asks the leaving faculty member why they are taking another position and about their university experiences. Instead, an Advance staffer will reach out to a faculty member a few months after they voluntarily left. This gives the former faculty member time to reflect on their work, and sometimes they speak with more candor since the interview is not with a member of their former department, Linderman said.
Isis Settles, an associate director of Advance and a professor of psychology and Afroamerican and African studies, said former faculty members consistently cite similar reasons for leaving. They note taking on more service work than their peers, a lack of leadership opportunities, and the department’s climate, she said.
In a 2019 faculty-departure report, the latest available report on exit interviews, junior faculty members who voluntarily left mentioned a lack of mentoring and recognition. Senior faculty members who left cited a lack of leadership or advancement opportunities.
This report also found that a negative work environment and dissatisfaction with leadership were frequently cited as reasons for leaving.
This finding is, in part, what prompted Advance to start a new committee — RISE, which stands for Respect in Striving for Excellence — to help faculty and staff members improve the atmosphere within their departments. Climate, or a department or unit’s particular environment, is an area where an individual leader can make a difference, Linderman said.
The Advance program teaches leaders strategies for handling stressful times, like when racist imagery appears outside a residence hall, or when there’s a racial threat on campus. Leaders are taught to make space for this distress, giving faculty members time to react and understand the incident, Linderman said. They’re also taught to model supportive behavior, like learning about what’s happening and attending rallies.
In many of the workshops and resources, there’s an emphasis on small wins that can affect broader changes, Settles said.
Changing Programs Based on Faculty Needs
Deborah Rivas-Drake, an associate director of Advance and professor of education and psychology, said that the program is constantly evaluating its workshops and resources to better understand what faculty members need. And ideas for new committees and workshops often come from research.
For example, a service-equity workshop was born out of another project about minority faculty-member retention, Rivas-Drake said.
During that service-equity workshop, attendees first learn that many faculty members of color, especially women, are pulled in different directions. They have to keep up with research, teaching, service work, and the additional emotional labor and work of mentorship that often comes with being one of the only faculty members of color in a department.
Department chairs are advised to assess faculty members’ work both within their department and on other parts of campus, Rivas-Drake said. Often, they don’t realize how much service work junior faculty members have taken on.
After this assessment, leaders should be clear about the expectations in different ranks, Settles said. The program also tackles bigger questions, like how to best reward the invisible service that supports students and the college.
Amy Hughes, a professor of theatre and drama and head of theatre studies, attended a workshop on visible and invisible labor. There, attendees were introduced to a tool that had everyone in the department take inventory of the visible and invisible labor that people do. Even something as simple as tracking the tasks people completed during the day was a game changer, Hughes said.
Scholars mostly rely on CVs to describe what they do, Hughes said. This tool allowed everyone to see not only how much invisible labor their colleagues were doing, but the types of tasks they were inclined to take on. For example, some people were working more in student advising or marketing. Seeing this on paper makes it easier for leaders to give people tasks in the areas that move or interest them, making them less likely to burn out, she said.
During a different workshop, Hughes said she learned how she was subjected to and sometimes perpetuated different forms of gatekeeping in her academic career. Much of the time, the unspoken rules of academe benefit insiders, who are often white, and keep out those who are unfamiliar. In grad-school seminars, for example, there’s an unspoken rule that successful students should speak with scholarship and authority, rather than asking questions.
In the interview process for faculty jobs, too, candidates are typically expected to give a public talk or presentation on campus, but the search committee’s criteria can be vague. This practice gives the candidate lots of guess work and doesn’t allow them to present their best and most authentic ideas, Hughes wrote in an email.
After the workshop, Hughes changed how she approached interactions with colleagues, teaching, and work on search committees.
Next year, Hughes will begin her role as a member of the Advance program’s Stride committee. As a tenured professor, she says she has the power to help improve the climate and retain faculty members of color.
“I really feel this is an emergency,” Hughes said. “We have to drop everything and address this.”
