My experiences in working with the History department chairs at the AHA focused on what changes can and should take place to address to positive outcomes for diverse faculty. There was general recognition that to meet the outcomes for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion, there must be a broad and fundamental change to academic culture. The culture change would be inclusive across the faculty life course – around hiring, mentoring, promotion, and retention. In this statement, I describe how changes to processes, financial models, and academic structures can lead to new forms of academic culture.
Processes refer to the tasks and actions we take to accomplish a goal and they form a tactical element of culture. In other words, our actions are what put culture into motion. When processes change, it can shift perspectives and lead to a changed culture. There has been considerable work to change hiring practices to positively influence diverse faculty hiring such as mandatory implicit bias training, rubrics to evaluate candidates, and reviewing job ads with attention to exclusionary language. For example, using rubrics to evaluate candidates aims to evaluate candidates fairly and reduce biases in hiring. Although still encouraged as a best practice, research though shows that these practices have mixed results in mitigating bias. In other words, rubrics and other processes should be part of the solution and not the panacea that some hope for (Flaherty 2022).
A second strategy to influence culture is incentives through financial models. Financial incentives are often aimed at academic colleges and departments to motivate action toward specific outcomes – such as marketing to grow student enrollment, seed grants to increase research expenditures, and partial or full funding toward faculty hiring. For faculty hiring, financial incentives include targeted hiring of individuals from underrepresented groups and postdoc to tenure track programs. For example, the University of California system, which was established in 1984, is a financial incentive model to individuals from underrepresented groups to advance into the UC tenure track system. Similarly, there have been priorities on cluster or constellation style hiring to build a critical mass of faculty to shift culture. https://ppfp.ucop.edu/info/ These efforts focus on faculty hiring with less attention to incentivize culture change especially around promotion, retention, and departmental culture. The idea though is that bringing in faculty of color into departments will lead to more inclusion and ultimately a culture shift. These are not always viewed as wins, a Harper (2023) describes as potentially damaging to the curricular needs of the humanities and not necessarily addressing culture. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/humanities-university-conservative-critics/676890/
The third strategy to change culture involves challenging and changing institutional structures. Most universities have hierarchical structures that include colleges and departments. The colleges and departments are typically organized around academic disciplines. Most institutions of higher education retain academic disciplines as the backbone for the institution’s structure. Nevertheless, some universities have built interdisciplinary schools and programs as an
evolution in 21st Century student and research needs. For example, at Arizona State University (ASU), the thought leader in building interdisciplinary academic structures, includes newly formed colleges such as the College of Global Futures, as well as redefined schools, such as the School of Social Transformation. Within these new structures, scholars from multiple disciplinary backgrounds align to create new degree programs, research grants, and problem solving in new and innovative ways. They have blended academic disciplines to address the most vexing global challenges and prepare students and scholars for the future.
Much of the conversation with the department chairs included the pros and cons around structural changes that are possible within a department. The large-scale structural changes, like those at ASU, were not within their sphere of influence and therefore not discussed. Nevertheless, we discussed possible structural changes such as departments that are focused on one or more focal areas rather than the more conventional comprehensive academic structure where all subdisciplines are represented. On the one hand, the chairs report that it is hard to get faculty to move away from the comprehensive program in part because of the strong tie to the undergraduate curriculum. The undergraduate curriculum is inherently comprehensive, and students expect that experts in the field will be teaching their courses. On the other hand, they simultaneously recognized that a specialized department would make them more visible and competitive, attract high quality scholars to work in those areas, and create a robust concentration of scholars who can work collaboratively.
We discussed the pros and cons of the specialized department approach. The advantage they reflect upon dealt with national and international reputation. They felt that being specialized gives a market advantage with respect to attracting faculty and graduate students, increasing research productivity, and leveraging more resources. The concerns raised dealt with a fear that their programs would shrink thus increasing the workload for faculty; and the concern that it reflects a shift away from the humanities. With a specialized department, the specific thematic areas could lead to deeper and more specific scholarship, that could be more inclusive. Furthermore, this more specificity could be explicitly designed around DEI areas of need.
The changes to culture described via process, financial and structure continue to be challenging. Individuals who benefit from the status quo fear the changing culture because it might mean they express concerns that they would be excluded in the new culture, or they might have to work differently to advance their careers. There is also often a zero-sum mindset – that if the culture shifts, then someone (and the fear is “me”) will need to be excluded. To address this, what remains is facing the realities of the continuum of change culture ranging from incremental shifts to total disruption. Incremental culture change would involve making small shifts – and having small wins – that over time create a new culture. These incremental changes ease people into the new culture. It allows institutions also to assess the current culture, identify what can change, and make those changes. The “hiring rubrics,” which continue to be controversial, represent that type of incremental shift. While research shows that these efforts can overcome and challenge some of the norms, it can be a slow process. In other words, it may not disrupt the culture enough to make a differences fast enough.