Read one way, the gains the University has made in faculty diversity are remarkable. In less than a decade, the number of racial and ethnic minorities on the faculty has increased by more than 40 percent.
But as The Herald reported last month ("Faculty still mostly male, white," Feb. 10), the lack of diversity within the faculty is still staggering. The University's recent hires make up a large portion of the faculty members who are female or racial and ethnic minorities, but that indicates how few women and minorities were previously on the faculty. In 2003, 21 members of the faculty were black compared to 31 today. What's more, the faculty's homogeneity — in gender, race and ethnicity — is consistent with the makeup of many U.S. institutions, including most of our peer institutions, which have suffered a similar lack of diversity in their faculties.
Over the past decade, the University has made a concerted effort to recruit and hire faculty of color. It has created an Office of Institutional Diversity and created a targeted hiring program that allows departments to recruit candidates who would add diversity to their ranks even when the department is not conducting a search to fill a position. Such policies help offset the high proportion of tenured professors at Brown — 72 percent, according to last month's Herald article — which slows down changes in the makeup of the faculty.
These efforts have achieved limited success — female and non-white members of the faculty have grown in number. Still, about two-thirds of the faculty are male and about four-fifths are white. And in last month's Herald article, professors and administrators pointed to the scarcity of qualified candidates in the job market as a contributing factor.
The validity of such comments is up for debate, but we think they are ultimately counterproductive. They give the impression that making the ranks of the faculty more diverse is outside of the University's hands. This overlooks Brown's own role in educating potential professors. About 15 percent of last academic year's graduate students identified themselves as members of a racial or ethnic minority, or as biracial, compared to nearly one-third of the undergraduate student body. Brown, like any other university, helps produce our country's pool of potential professors.
We also urge the University to remember that recruiting a diverse faculty is a fruitless endeavor if new hires come to an institution whose environment is not welcoming, supportive or tolerant. The administration and individual departments should create programs that actively aim to integrate new hires into a department — for example, by establishing mentors for new minority faculty, as suggested by the American Association of University Professors in a document on building a more diverse faculty.
Problems such as these are self-perpetuating — the less diverse a university is, the more likely it is that a new minority hire will feel isolated or out of place. The University has begun to increase the diversity of the researchers and teachers who perform its core activities. Only by actively working toward a positive experience and welcoming environment for new hires who are faculty of color can it hope to build on what it has already achieved.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
