The recent report from BU’s Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion begins with a striking sentence: “Data on the Association of American Universities indicate that Boston University ranks near the bottom in its percentage of underrepresented racial and ethnic minority faculty compared to the available population.” In other words, we are behind our peer AAU institutions, despite the fact that Boston is a racially diverse and dynamic city, and despite the availability of diverse faculty candidates. The report raises serious issues about the degree to which our campus is welcoming to racial minorities and diverse others. These facts challenge us to examine our commitment to diversity and to redouble our efforts to live up to the historic legacy of inclusion at Boston University.
To examine our commitment, we need to begin by asking: What is diversity? And why is it important to us as an elite American research university? “Diversity” has multiple meanings, ranging from a narrow, legal definition that includes only those racial or ethnic groups that are significantly disadvantaged today in the US compared to majority whites. A wider definition includes gender and sexual categories of disadvantage compared to straight cis men. The widest definition refers not to disadvantage but to any form of difference, including ideological and religious difference.
Diversity in our intellectual community is important for at least three reasons. First, we have a moral imperative to further social mobility and justice. As an institution of higher education, BU is especially well placed to further this by teaching students from marginalized or less privileged groups, and by extending opportunities for faculty from these groups to teach and conduct their research from the great platform that BU provides. Second, we have an educational imperative to build a diverse intellectual community because it teaches all students to communicate across difference, and thereby equips them to be at home in a multicultural world. By multicultural I refer not only to the differences across nations and ethnicities, but also those across the subcultures defined by many other differences such as religion, sexuality, and social class. Third, there is what we might call an innovation imperative to build a diverse intellectual community because it is most likely to bring out the best in all of us through competition and the challenges of communicating our ideas clearly and compellingly to diverse others.
These three imperatives suggest that we should care about the entire scope of diversity, but there are special responsibilities to pay attention to the dimension of disadvantage. Diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender/sexuality are necessary for us to live up to our moral and social responsibilities, as well as to learn across difference. Diversity of ideas and perspectives is also important for communication, and all forms of diversity are needed to satisfy the third imperative.
In the context of the Task Force Report, diversity refers to the narrow scope and its recommendations aim to improve diversity at BU in terms of disadvantaged race and ethnicity relative to majority whites. That is entirely justified because of our special responsibility as a university, our historic legacy of racial and gender inclusion, and our frankly poor performance in racial diversity. While we have a wide diversity of cultural and national background, we are not doing well including Blacks, Latino/as and Native Americans among our students and faculty, and this means we are falling down on our moral and social responsibility to provide opportunity for the most disadvantaged groups. But we are also missing key perspectives from which we all can learn a great deal. Although diversity by gender/sexuality is badly needed in some of our departments, this racial diversity is needed in all of them.
The Report discusses ways we can improve diversity, beginning with a strategic plan and leadership. It cautions against incomplete, empty gestures, and emphasizes the need to move from talk to action. The Report criticizes previous unsuccessful efforts to improve diversity and inclusion, and recommends “change at all levels of BU leadership at BU.” The Provost and President have announced the search committed for a new Associate Provost devoted to diversity university wide. But we must not wait for the position to be filled to lay the ground for a more diverse faculty here in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Focusing on our faculty hiring, we must pursue strategies that will succeed in landing diverse faculty. There are four stages of the process to consider: designing the position description, building a diverse pool of candidates, selecting candidates to bring to campus, and recruiting selected diverse candidates. We hire faculty on an annual cycle that finds our departments at different points in this cycle, though none have yet completed the selection of final candidates. Beginning at that point it is important for all faculty to understand the forces of unconscious bias that lead to diverse candidates being eliminated and how to counteract them. When diverse candidates are on campus it is important to understand how stereotype threat can undermine the performance of diverse candidates, giving us a false impression of their potential. It is also important to show diverse candidates the full range of opportunities available to support them and their families. It is important to recognized and appreciate difference, not to ignore it and to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and that is often best done by connecting candidates with faculty groups that share their diverse identities.
Many departments are still building their candidate pools. To optimally build diverse pools it is important to develop networks and connections with colleagues who can recommend to diverse candidates that they apply for positions at BU. Connect with diverse subgroups in your professional organizations; make visits to HBCU’s and Hispanic serving institutions; connect with mentoring workshops for graduate students that are designed to help minorities. Some of these are the strategies to pursue continuously, but they can also help find candidates during a search. Finally, departments may need to think differently about how they describe positions in order to bring more diverse candidates. In some fields that may mean including the study of race, class or gender among the topics that successful candidates could pursue. In other fields it may mean opening a search to a wider range of specialties to raise the probability that a diversity candidate can apply.
We in the Dean’s Office are here to support your hiring diverse candidates. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us for advice and support of your efforts. We will be applying a higher level of scrutiny to our results in order to bring more diverse candidates to the faculty. Next year, as you define your search requests, we will ask you to discuss how your proposed search has been described so as to bring about as many diverse candidates as possible. This is a moral and social imperative, and will make our College a better place to study and do research, and result in greater innovation, discovery and thought.