Oct 4 FACULTY DIVERSITY

As I read Chapter 5 I found myself a little disinterested in the concern of having faculty members of diversity at the college level. Personally, I’ve had a fairly diverse set of instructors. Some have been great and some I felt were not high quality. The text did a good job of presenting some of the benefits of a diverse faculty, but nothing particularly outstanding. It seemed like common sense to me. I was interested in the fact that  the various forms of recruitment and the wording of ads  produced such different results in applications and hiring.  The author highlighted some good ideas for changing recruitment approaches that I think would possibly result in more diverse hiring.

There was one point of discussion  that struck me on page 159. The author cites a study that talks about the trend for candidates to be hired if they had integrated diversity into their expertise. It was troubling to me that a white male who did ‘feminist studies’ would be chosen over a women for a position when other things were similar. I was not upset because I was a women, but because it illustrated the problem more remarkably than the other commentary. Following this was a discussion about this creating a disinterest in URM candidates who then turn to fields other than education where their expertise would be more valued. Perhaps, I was a little dense in getting the point, but it’s a tragedy to be losing that pool of quality candidates. For me, this really brought the faculty diversity issue to a head for me.