FAQ for "U.S. Universities are Not Succeeding in Diversifying Faculty"
by J. Nathan Matias, Neil Lewis Jr, and Elan C. Hope
I want to use this data in my own research. Where can I find the data and materials?
I see your point about pipelines, but how else could we study and analyze academic careers?
Why do you think Higher Education is lagging behind other sectors?
What would the benefits be of a much more diverse faculty?
What else can I read about this topic?
Data is available from the US government, IPEDS, and Opportunity Insights. We have created a repository that includes links to those resources, all code for querying the relevant datafiles, and software for computing tens of thousands of projections for different universities. Data is available on github at github.com/natematias/US-Faculty-Diversity-Projections
We get it— the pipeline analogy is statistically and organizationally convenient because it allows an institution to study a question internally without needing data from others. Techniques from mortality statistics are also widely taught in intro statistics courses, making them readily available to many people. But research in isolation can mislead individual institutions and enable the perverse incentives we describe in the study— people who leave a job or don't get hired are still going somewhere. That's why the Association of Public Land Grant Universities has called instead for a "pathways" model of studying faculty diversity. For quantitative researchers, that involves more network analysis, supported by privacy-protecting data sharing across institutions (something the AAAS is working on at SEA Change).
U.S. Universities talk about being champions of diversity, but you’re right that they are less equitable than other skilled sectors, as professor Pamela Newkirk describes in her 2020 book Diversity Inc. The film industry, for example, featured black people in 18% of film roles in 2021, compared to universities, where Black professors are less than 7% of tenure-track faculty. But when it comes to leadership opportunities, many fields have similar patterns— Black directors are only 9.5% of directors in Hollywood. Scholars call this “cosmetic diversity.” More generally, as Newkirk describes in detail, relatively few diversity efforts at universities have been systematically evaluated, leading to efforts that look good in press releases but whose effectiveness remains unclear.
America’s universities justify their diversity goals with both moral and instrumental reasons. Many universities argue that it’s the morally right thing to do. As universities and academic societies acknowledge and apologize for their role in racism and colonialism, they are taking steps to put things right. Instrumentally, a diverse faculty improves higher education’s ability to achieve its purpose of excellence in education and research. This instrumental view of diversity has become so orthodox in the US that people sometimes need reminding of the moral reasons too.
Since our goal is to talk about wider trends and the problems of thinking at an individual institutional level, we chose institutions near the median.