In modern higher education, nurturing successful interdisciplinary collaboration is both an institutional priority and a grand organizational and cultural challenge. Recent scholarship describes the many and varied challenges inherent in the enactment of interdisciplinarity; it also explores how these challenges can be mitigated to spur successful…

Faculty members are entrusted with great power to decide who deserves space within the academic profession. Given that the profession's central mission is knowledge production, such decisions inevitably concern epistemic matters, and specifically, what constitutes legitimate knowledge. From this perspective, faculty hiring is not only a matter of…

As the face of higher education has changed, the need for a more diverse workforce has increased. It is aspirational and essential for students of color to see themselves reflected in the faces of their faculty and staff. Campus diversity enriches the educational experience for all faculty, staff, and students. Unfortunately, the rate of hiring…

Efforts to mitigate bias in faculty hiring processes are well-documented in the literature. Yet, significant barriers to the hiring of racially minoritized and White women in many STEM fields remain. An underreported barrier to inclusive hiring is assessment of risk. Guided by theory from behavioral economics, social psychology, and…

Bias among faculty search committees has been considered a significant barrier to diversifying the professoriate. Given the traditional faculty hierarchy in academia, junior faculty search chairs may not have the positional power to challenge authority when confronted with bias or prejudice. Yet, search chairs are expected to ensure equitable…

Faculty hiring is an important dimension of diversity efforts across many postsecondary institutions. Many U.S. colleges and universities have released faculty job announcements establishing a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a necessary criterion for applicants. This move is significant because it entrenches…

This case study examined how color-evasive racism operated through search committee members' practices in ways that undermined university policy created to centralize racial equity in faculty hiring. Findings show that abstract liberalism, racialized decoupling, and racialized agency impeded the realization of an equitable search process. Faculty…

This evaluation of faculty hiring examines how eight faculty search chairs at a border Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) discuss how they enact an HSI consciousness when making hiring decisions. Using a combined phenomenological case study approach, the author examines hiring through a conceptual framework that brings together organizational…

Background/Context: Although academic departments have more tools to advance faculty diversity than ever before, many still downplay their own responsibility throughout the hiring process. This results in a cycle of apathy that activates once searches are already under way, and structural change is out of reach. Yet few studies empirically outline…

The boundaries between universities of applied sciences and universities in the binary higher education system in Germany have begun to blur. This is likely to affect the criteria for hiring professors, too. The article investigates whether or not there is a similarity of the relative weight universities of applied sciences and universities put on…

Despite a growing population, the underrepresentation of African American faculty in predominantly White institutions (PWIs) is a growing concern in the United States. Recent studies indicate PWIs have been focused on increasing diverse student enrollment, particularly among African Americans, but not on recruiting and retaining African American…

Various concerns regarding the vitality and racial/ethnic composition of the academic profession have prompted new study of faculty search committees and hiring paradigms, most notably examining the term "fit" in candidate appraisals. Yet no study utilizes a candidate evaluation framework to investigate whether or not faculty members…

This paper is the fourth revision of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) paper on equivalency adopted by the delegates to the plenary session in Fall 1989. Previous revisions were adopted in 1999, 2006, and 2016. The original paper was intended to help local academic senates develop policies and procedures in response to…

This study updates and expands upon past work on how tenure-track hiring committees evaluate teaching effectiveness to provide centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) current data as they support graduate students and postdocs navigating the academic hiring process. In this study, 166 hiring committee chairs from nine academic disciplines and a…

Increasingly, universities are screening candidates for professorships on their commitment to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). In 2018, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Heather Mac Donald drew attention, in a "Los Angeles Times" op-ed, to the decision at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) to require…