6338 Views (as of 05/2023)
  1. Linda Mason
  2. Associate Dean Graduate School and Professor of Entomology
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Purdue University
  1. Mark Smith
  2. Dean and Professor of ECE
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Purdue University
  1. Chris Sahley
  2. Professor
  3. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  4. Purdue University

Diversifying the Faculty—A Key Ingredient in Broadening Part

NSF Awards: 1309173

2016 (see original presentation & discussion)

Graduate

This presentation describes the activities of the CIC AGEP-T program titled “Professorial Advancement Initiative” (PAI), the goal of which is to double the rate at which CIC institutions (i.e. the Big-10 conference universities) hire underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The PAI takes a two-pronged approach to achieving its faculty diversity goal, which involves: a) creating within the CIC a pool of URM postdocs who have been well prepared and trained to enter the academy as tenure-track faculty members; and b) coaching faculty members to become leaders in diversity hiring—that is, exposing search committees to the literature about unconscious bias and the compelling benefits of having a diverse faculty.

To properly prepare URM postdocs for entry into the academy, we recruit them into the program, where they are mentored by one or more faculty members at the home campus and at other CIC schools, to provide guidance and entrée into faculty positions. In parallel we are implementing training programs for faculty hiring committees on the CIC campuses. Collectively, the CIC will hire hundreds of new professors in STEM fields over the next three years, which will involve hundreds of faculty searches. The CIC AGEP training team is partnering with AGEP directors and campus leaders to coach faculty on diversity hiring.

In addition, the CIC AGEP staff has developed an online enrollment form for PAI postdocs. The staff maintains a repository of URM faculty candidates as a resource for CIC faculty search committees.

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Discussion from the NSF 2016 STEM For All Video Showcase (15 posts)
  • Icon for: Melissa Borts

    Melissa Borts

    Program Associate
    May 17, 2016 | 01:34 p.m.

    After watching your video, I am interested to know if you assist the fellows in finding positions at the big 10 schools that are involved in the program. Do you have evaluation results that you can share about your program?

  • Icon for: Mark Smith

    Mark Smith

    Co-Presenter
    Dean and Professor of ECE
    May 18, 2016 | 04:51 p.m.

    Thank you for your interest. The post docs participating in our program have mentors within the CIC, who help prepare them for faculty positions and coach them in the job search process. We also have a CIC directory of post docs which we share with our CIC search committees. This helps connect our post docs with CIC faculty positions.

  • Icon for: Sarah Gerard

    Sarah Gerard

    Facilitator
    Education Researcher
    May 17, 2016 | 10:01 p.m.

    What a great (and needed!) project. When you say that the program thus far has been highly successful– what metrics are you using?

  • Icon for: Mark Smith

    Mark Smith

    Co-Presenter
    Dean and Professor of ECE
    May 18, 2016 | 07:25 a.m.

    Thank you for your comment and question. The program is successful in the sense that we have built a community of post docs within the CIC whom we have mentored and continue to mentor for faculty positions. And, we have educated search committee faculty members on our CIC campuses about unconscious bias and the importance of diversity and inclusion.

    The goal of our project is to double the rate at which the CIC universities (Big 10) hire underrepresented minority STEM faculty members (who are US citizens). At the start of the project, a baseline hiring rate was defined by taking the average rate for the CIC schools over the previous three years. That baseline is 24 URM STEM faculty members/year and so we set a target goal of 50/yr. Now in our third year of the program, we appear to be on track to hire over 60/yr.

  • Icon for: Kelly Pudelek

    Kelly Pudelek

    Facilitator
    Survey Specialist
    May 18, 2016 | 01:09 p.m.

    Great video! Can you further explain the mentoring aspect? What has the response been from faculty search committees on the training program?

  • Icon for: Linda Mason

    Linda Mason

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Dean Graduate School and Professor of Entomology
    May 18, 2016 | 01:20 p.m.

    Sure – We pair Postdocs with both their faculty mentor on their own campus and with faculty mentors at other CIC campuses. We then have a series of topics that we ask the postdocs and mentors to discuss through their first year or more. Participating postdocs also participate in once a month conference call /webinar on topics that they determine. Many of a panel discussion with time for questions. We have had excellent response from our faculty search workshops with respect to attendance and comments. We have seen demand for the diversity and bias research information grow as more faculty find out about the topics covered at the workshop and the positive results search committees have in recruiting URMs to the campus.

  • Icon for: Tamara Moore

    Tamara Moore

    Associate Professor, Engineering Education & EngrTEAMS Principal Investigator
    May 18, 2016 | 03:38 p.m.

    Thank you for this work. As Purdue faculty in engineering, I am pleased to see this initiative. I know that we always want to diversify our faculty, but often the candidates who apply are not diverse or when they are we have trouble competing to get them to come to Purdue (this was true when I was faculty in Minnesota too). What are your thoughts in terms of diversifying our pool of candidates so that we have top-notch potential faculty members who will also want to come here?

  • Icon for: Linda Mason

    Linda Mason

    Lead Presenter
    Associate Dean Graduate School and Professor of Entomology
    May 18, 2016 | 04:52 p.m.

    A great technique is to always be in the recruiting mode because you never know when a position is going to come available or when a contact with someone might develop into a future candidate. I look for great URM graduate students and post docs at meetings/conferences/workshops and invite them to visit the department – even with no position available. A good experience on campus and with the department is critical to someone passing on a great review of the campus and department. Plus, these individuals will get an invited talk on their resume and we gain a future recruiter for Purdue, and maybe a future colleague. When a position is open, targeted recruiting to organizations with a large URM membership is a great way and having connections, and more important, relationships with the faculty at other institutions that produce a large number of URM PhD’s is critical. Do faculty in each department/discipline know who is producing great URM PhD’s? This is a good question to ask at a faculty meeting – the earlier you build those relationships the better. In the search and screen manual there is a list of places and organizations that have minority PhD’s – that is a great source to advertise and do personal calls to recruit folks to apply. We find that if you can get someone to apply, recruiting to Purdue is not as hard as many think. This is a great institution and has many good things that a potential faculty member would find attractive. The hardest thing right now is dual career folks – regardless of race – finding two jobs is often a challenge, but the new concierge service is very helpful, and the provost office and departments do their best to accommodate requests.

  • Icon for: Mark Smith

    Mark Smith

    Co-Presenter
    Dean and Professor of ECE
    May 18, 2016 | 04:59 p.m.

    Yes indeed. Successfully recruiting URM faculty is a challenges. The search committee workshops we’ve developed for faculty address aggressive active recruiting, running a productive faculty search, and attracting candidates to join the faculty. The CIC post doc directory that we’ve developed as part of this project is also an important resource.

  • Icon for: Marian Pasquale

    Marian Pasquale

    Facilitator
    Senior Research Scientist
    May 19, 2016 | 02:10 p.m.

    What important work this is. I’m interested to learn how this Alliance formed?

  • Charity CIC

    Guest
    May 19, 2016 | 05:44 p.m.

    The CIC was formed in 1958 by the Presidents of the Big Ten universities. The Presidents formed the organization and appointed the member university provosts to serve as the board. Each university contributes an equal share of the funds to operate the organization, and a staff of 25 manages the projects and initiatives.

  • Carol Lumm

    Guest
    May 19, 2016 | 05:10 p.m.

    This is very interesting, and has applications outside the university setting. Can you say more about your coaching of faculty to become leaders in diversity hiring? Other than training in implicit bias, what other topics do you cover?

  • Icon for: Mark Smith

    Mark Smith

    Co-Presenter
    Dean and Professor of ECE
    May 19, 2016 | 06:23 p.m.

    In the hiring workshops we cover many topics, such as:
    The importance of faculty diversity from the university perspective;
    Best practices in running a faculty search;
    Roles and expectations of search committee members;
    How to recruit a diverse pool of high caliber applicants;
    Issues of Diversity and Excellence;
    Discussion of best practices and worse mistakes;
    Unconscious assumptions and biases;
    Mitigating the negative effects of bias;
    Running a fair review process
    Interviewing;
    Documenting the search;

  • Icon for: Kelly Pudelek

    Kelly Pudelek

    Facilitator
    Survey Specialist
    May 21, 2016 | 07:15 p.m.

    That is a lot of topics! Can you describe the topic “best practices” more? What are some of the best practices?

  • Icon for: Ann Austin

    Ann Austin

    Professor of Higher Education
    May 23, 2016 | 05:57 p.m.

    I was glad to see this video and learn more about the very important work you are doing both with postdocs and with faculty members. Have you done any qualitative evaluation work to assess how the videos and training efforts are impacting the thinking and behaviors of faculty members? The work you are doing with search committees and on alerting faculty to issues around implicit bias and how it can affect the recruiting and hiring processes has similarities with related work happening on many campuses that have ADVANCE grants (and of course there are a number of CIC campuses that have had ADVANCE grants). In what ways have there been explicit interactions between the AGEP and the ADVANCE programs on the campuses where you work? I am quite interested in how we can all find ways to leverage and expand efforts when we are aware of and explicitly seek to connect programs with similar goals working on the same campuses. Thank you for your excellent work and very interesting video!

  • Further posting is closed as the event has ended.