In my time as an Advisory Board member for the Progress program with SSRC, I was able to bear witness to the effects of leading in-depth and action oriented discussions with AHA chairs during a small group workshop in Chicago, IL. At first, I was pessimistic about their ability to really conceptualize the impact of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in their departments since the discipline of History tends to lack diversity, especially at the chair level. However, I was pleasantly surprised. What was most striking, was how eager all chairs were to see not only their departments, but their institutions. implement real change in order to diversify and create an environment of belonging and inclusion throughout the hiring to promotion process. Many chairs faced similar challenges in their DEI efforts and in that shared experience, a few were able to offer some positive outcomes from initiatives they had already begun to roll out in their own institutions.
One example of these efforts was a program at one institution whereby recent grads are mentored by the institution in a paid post-doc prior to being formally hired by that institution (a guaranteed position). The post-doc has a department mentor, can learn more about the institution, and begin to form relationships with faculty members. The faculty mentors are also held accountable for helping their mentee produce a publication that can be used once hired as a tenured track faculty member. Many chairs felt this was cutting edge and something they would like to see implemented in their own departments. As a sociologist and former DEI Director for the American Sociological Association, I was able to bring together some ideas chairs could workshop in-house with hiring and promotion committees. Some of these ideas included cluster hiring where a group of new hires come in at the same time and have special programming dedicated to their onboarding as new faculty to create a cohort effect and sense of belonging. We also talked at length about taking names off of applications to offset implicit biases of racial or ethnic privilege and disadvantage and taking names off of letters of recommendation due to prestige biases, which might influence committee members. Another suggestion was for committees to wait on asking for letters of recommendation until after the short list is created for hiring. We also discussed not having the graduating institution name on the application to avoid the influence of elite institutions.
In terms of promotion and tenure, we agreed departments ought to have clear terms and benchmarks for faculty to move up in rank or to obtain tenure from the time they are hired. Faculty should be assigned a mentor within the department and that mentor needs to be held accountable for meeting regularly with their mentee and creating small, agreed upon, benchmarks throughout the year. Along with this, we discussed that departments would benefit from having annual reviews with each junior or associate faculty member where goals are outlined for the following year, so that there are clear measures in place as they move through their research, service, and teaching agendas, especially if those three areas are not weighted equally. We agreed that no faculty member should ever be surprised at the tenure juncture if they have clear benchmarks.
Lastly, in these annual reviews, we talked about creating space for the weight of invisible workload i.e. On campus and off campus service work, how many students you mentor or advise formally and informally in and outside of your department, how much time is spent with students who may be unprepared and need supplemental assistance outside of class. We discussed creating space for weighing outside creative works that speak to one’s research or area of expertise, white papers, blog contributions, op-eds, community engaged scholarship, other DEI work and committees that look to you to diversify their committee. This invisible workload can be added in order to have a more complete understanding of why certain faculty members perhaps are not able to focus all their attention to publishing more formal books and articles. We recognized that it is the institutions themselves that need to broaden their concept of productivity in academia, a challenge many chairs felt. AHA chairs utilized this workshop effectively in order to share and learn from each other, discuss the possibilities of changing the norms of their institutional culture, and create a more open space for diverse voices in academia. As facilitator of this workshop, I am happy that my own pessimism was obliterated by the eagerness of these chairs and their dedication to positive change.