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?

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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;

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!