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Initial Publication Date: December 4, 2011

Strategies for Increasing Faculty Diversity and Addressing Departmental Climate

This list was produced by a brainstorming session at the 2011 Heads and Chairs workshop. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of possible strategies. Rather, these are suggestions based on workshop participants' experiences.

  • Make sure you don't hire someone who looks just like you (in appearance or in specialty) -- avoid clones
  • Have a broad search and consider diversity as a criterion
  • Have a female chair for the search committee (National Academies Press, 2010 ); perhaps the same applies to having underrepresented groups chair search committees
  • Use an evaluation rubric -- establish criteria before the search committee starts reading applications
  • Set up a STRIDE committee
  • Make targeted hires
  • Get institutional support: childcare, tenure clock, dual career hires, etc.
  • Recruitment starting earlier -- bringing women and minorities into the sciences as early as high school?
  • Have an effective mentoring program for junior faculty, and also for associate professors rising to full professor
  • Teaching relief for faculty developing their tenure portfolios
  • Lunches for subgroups of faculty (women, underrepresented groups)