Despite the increasing diversity among America’s college students, business school professors remain overwhelmingly white.
In U.S. business schools, Black and Hispanic individuals make up 23.2% of students, yet only 6.7% of the faculty.
As a researcher with an interest in the reasons business schools lack diverse faculty, I – along with marketing professor Sonja Martin Poole – talked to 21 Black and Hispanic professors who have served on search committees at business schools throughout the U.S. We found four major reasons professors of color often get screened out of the process.
Race is unmentionable. Search committees rarely have open conversations about race, the professors in our study told us. They described conversations about race as “anemic” and “uncomfortable,” which in turn led people to avoid the topic.
The faculty members in our study described a variety of reasons they believed search committees avoided talking about race. These include different beliefs about fairness and fear of saying something that could lead them to be seen as racist.
When discussions about race are hampered, we believe it makes it more difficult to recruit diverse faculty.
“Diversity” is poorly understood. Faculty members told us that many of their colleagues thought their school was already diverse since the schools had business professors from around the world.
This view is at odds with most diversity efforts in American higher education, which aim to increase Black and Hispanic faculty members from the U.S. because of historical disadvantages that both groups have faced in this country.
Others discussed broad views of diversity, which included sexual preference, gender orientation and diversity of thought as important criteria.
The absence of a clear definition of diversity enables individual search committee members to define or interpret diversity as they see fit.
Blind faith in “colorblind” criteria. Even though search committees were using supposedly merit-based or “colorblind” criteria, Black and Hispanic candidates still got screened out of the process.
For instance, search committees might consider the number of times a candidate has been published in an academic journal. But this ignores the fact that many Black and Hispanic scholars may study race-related topics, which are largely absent from and marginalized at top-ranked marketing journals.
Search committees also consider the status of the school from which the candidate received their doctorate, as well as who was their adviser. Historically, elite schools have had limited racial diversity among their faculty.
Hierarchy and gatekeepers matter. Faculty members in our study felt they were invited to be on search committees to be the token “diversity voice.” But powerful committee members – such as the department chair and full professors – often determine whom is eventually hired.
Given Black and Hispanic faculty members were often “the only one” from their group on these search committees, and rarely at the full professor level, typically they felt they had to go against the grain to disrupt any observed bias.
At business schools that had more racially diverse faculty, some participants told us that there were strong diversity advocates in senior administration or on the faculty. This suggests that strong diversity advocates are what’s yielding a diverse faculty. Once they leave, future hires may not be as diverse.
The absence of racially diverse faculty cheats students out of a high-quality education by limiting their exposure to the views of educators from diverse racial backgrounds.
In order to bring about more diversity among business school faculty, I believe colleges and universities must acknowledge the various ways race influences faculty hiring in order to find ways to make hiring more inclusive.
Sonya A. Grier is a marketing professor at American University Kogod School of Business. Distributed by The Associated Press.