Keynote Address — Our Nation’s Professoriate, Diversity and Racism: The Five Truths We Don’t Want to Confront

Dr. Marybeth Gasman, Judy & Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Gasman opened her talk with an article she wrote (which, in turn, came out of a blunt response she gave at a conference, when asked about the lack of faculty of color). Her argument was — and still is — that “we [the universities, academia, etc.] don’t want them.”

The response to this article was about 7,000 emails: about 5,000 from people of color who have PhDs and cannot find jobs; another 1,000 from people who have perpetrated the sort of systemic discrimination that she described in her article, but who were horrified to realize what they’d inadvertently been doing; 500 from nice white faculty thanking her for writing her article; and another 500 making all sorts of vile, racist arguments about how she was wrong and why Black applicants were in fact less qualified for these faculty positions.

Truth #1: We invoke “quality” as a strategy for dismissal of applicants of color

This is the language that systemic racism manifests in, particularly among faculty who know not to be overtly racist, but (consciously or subconsciously) think that people of color are less intelligent or qualified than a comparable white applicant. We don’t question the quality of the degrees of white applicants, but somehow this becomes a very pressing concern when we see applicants of color. When people say things like “I value diversity, but I worry about quality” there’s an implicit assumption that diversity = low quality. Which is a racist assumption.

Truth #2: We claim faculty of color are missing from the pipeline.

This is a lie. The most recent Survey of Earned Doctorates notes that there has been “31% increase in the number of doctorates awarded to blacks or African Americans over the past 10 years and a 71% increase in the number of Hispanic or Latino doctorate recipients.” 52% of PhDs earned in 2015 were by white students, and yet 76% of faculty across the nation are white. There are people out there — Gasman heard from about 5,000 of them. The numbers don’t back up this claim.

A second problem here is that we also aren’t creating pipelines. The more diverse institutions are not always the most prestigious institutions (there’s a LOT of history and politics behind why that is), and plenty of “elite institutions” (i.e., Ivies and schools who think of themselves as comparable to Ivies) think that creating pipelines with some of these diverse institutions is beneath them. After all, they’re worried about quality.

Truth #3: Exceptions are the rule in academe…only for some

This was one of the most anger-inducing points of her talk. Gasman shared examples of hiring exceptions she’s seen, and these exceptions (shocker!) disproportionately get made for white people. It isn’t always explicitly about race, but it’s often about networking and connections, which happens to correlate with race. White faculty members at predominantly white departments/institutions generally have white students (after all, the department sure seems welcoming to white students, and potentially unwelcoming to people of color, who don’t see anyone who looks like them on the faculty there). So when there’s a job opening, faculty members will recommend their students, and exceptions might get made because someone came so highly recommended by such a respected member of the field. In a competitive job market, it’s that much harder for people of color to get a job when they have to compete with other applicants who are getting exceptions made on their behalf. It’s not a fair fight.

Truth #4: Search committees reproduce the status quo

This gets at something that underlies #3 as well. There’s this nebulous quality of “fit” — search committees want someone who will fit well in the department. And what’s wrong with that?

Well, we “fit” well with people who are like us. That isn’t always about race or ethnicity, but it correlates. Left to their own devices, people tend to have fairly homogeneous social circles — we gravitate toward people who are similar to us. And we’re more likely to find common ground with people who have similar backgrounds and who were shaped by similar cultural experiences. “Fit” ends up being a criterion that disadvantages the very people who would increase diversity.

Truth #5: We have the answers to diversify the faculty, but we choose to ignore them.

This is the real kicker of all her points — there are not insurmountable obstacles to increasing faculty diversity. We just aren’t willing to do these things. Sometimes it would take money (which most institutions have, whether or not they choose to spend it on hiring diverse faculty), sometimes it would take making changes to campus or town climate, so that an institution is appealing to people of color. Sometimes, it means changing campus traditions that are alienating or marginalizing. These aren’t necessarily easy, but if we care about increasing diversity, then we need to be willing to give something up.

Out of all the wonderful points Gasman made, and during the Q & A, there were a few additional things that really stuck out to me:

• The best way to insulate yourself from backlash (if you’re committing yourself to doing the work of equity and inclusion) is to be productive beyond reproach. If someone wants to get rid of you for being a troublemaker, they’ll question your priorities and your productivity.
• This work cannot fall on the most vulnerable and the most overburdened. If a white person raises issues of racism, they are less likely to face the sort of repercussions that a person of color might face. Their concerns are less likely to be dismissed. No one will brush them off and say they’re “just playing the race card.” Gasman herself started her talk by saying that nothing she was saying was new — people of color have been saying this forever, but more people listen to her when she says the same thing because she’s a white woman. If you’re white, if you’re a man, if you’re tenured — you have relative security. You’re the people who need to speak up, because we can’t keep putting all the burden of changing the system on the people who are already most disadvantaged by that system.
• Admissions committees and hiring committees need some training about the ways that biases can manifest. If we don’t think we’re doing anything wrong, then we won’t seek out how to fix those things, and the process will never get better. The biggest action step that I had coming out of this talk was to share this information WIDELY and to talk to colleagues across my field about whether search committees at their institutions do any sort of training before they start reading applications. Simply being aware of our own biases can help us be less guided by those biases, and this seems like such an easy first step.