TRAINING FACULTY SEARCH COMMITTEES TO IMPROVE RACIAL AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN HIRING

There is a critical need to hire faculty from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds at universities around the United States. Internal faculty consultants may help to address this need by training faculty members who serve on search committees about bias and inequities that affect the search process along with ways to avoid them. This case study seeks to guide internal faculty consultants in the United States who do this work and to address the paucity of academic attention to the process of finding workshops, securing support, and ultimately implementing such training. Specifically, this case study describes (a) how a university faculty committee on institutional equity and diversity located, secured support for, and implemented a series of faculty search training workshops aimed to improve diversity and equity in hiring; (b) the number of faculty who were trained and attendees' feedback about the training; and (c) lessons learned (i.e., challenges, successes, and recommendations for replicating at other institutions). Findings from this case study reveal the labor involved in galvanizing the support of multiple stakeholders for the training workshop while simultaneously assembling a training program that was not explicitly designed for replication elsewhere. Forty-seven of the 310 (15%) full-time faculty from across the campus attended the 4-hr workshop. Attendees reported takeaways from each of the session modalities, such as the importance of objective and consistent criteria throughout the evaluation process. The authors provide a set of recommendations for replicating this work at other institutions, including tailoring the workshops to the specific schools within the university.