Report illustrates lack of faculty diversity

In the first-ever JHU Report on Faculty Composition, the Office of the Provost evaluated faculty diversity in all nine departmental divisions of the University. The report provides a baseline measurement for future efforts to diversify.

Released on Thursday, Sept. 22, the report uses data from the faculty census of Nov. 2015 with further corrections from March 2016. It includes responses from 84 percent of faculty members.

The report released a study on the statistics of three categories: women faculty members, minority faculty members and underrepresented minority (URM) faculty members. It defined URM ethnicities as black, American Indian, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and native Alaskan. The report placed all non-white respondents into the minority category.

It also indicated percentage increases in all three categories, though to differing degrees. Over the past six years, there was a seven percent increase in minority faculty, four percent increase in women and a two percent increase in URMs.

Thirty percent of faculty members in the nine divisions were minorities and eight percent were URMs. The Education, Business and Nursing schools had the largest proportion of URMs, with percentages hovering around 10 percent.

Asian faculty members were the most represented minority in seven of the nine divisions. Black faculty members were the most represented in the Education and Nursing divisions, and the most represented URM in five of the nine divisions.

Women made up 42 percent of faculty overall, with more women in non-professorial ranks than professorial ranks. They are least represented in Engineering at 19 percent while women constitute the majority of faculty in Education, Nursing and Public Health. The percentage of women who were full-time professors increased in three of the four largest divisions, while Engineering remained at nine percent.

However, women are better represented in junior ranks, such as assistant or associate professorship positions. The report also showed a higher percentage of minority and URM faculty in assistant or associate professor positions, indicating that the University has been hiring more diverse faculty in junior ranks.

In Nov. 2015, the University launched a $25 million Faculty Diversity Initiative (FDI). The five-year plan established new guidelines for recruiting and hiring minority and female faculty, oversight of candidate lists, increased funding for postdoc fellowships, campus stays by minority scholars and unconscious bias training for members of faculty search committees. Following the FDI, the University has announced that it will hire 30 URM faculty members for the 2016-17 year.

Executive Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Stephen Gange noted that the University is not imposing hiring quotas. The report, instead, aims to make faculty composition better reflect student diversity at Hopkins.

“This is a very smart approach. Some universities target metrics off the bat before they have foundations that they can build on. We’re recruiting people who can be a part of the culture,” Gange said.

According to the most recent data from the Office of the Registrar, 19 percent of students in the Class of 2019 were URMs, 21 percent were Asian and 49 percent of all undergraduates are women. In contrast, Hopkins faculty was eight percent URMs, 22 percent Asian and 42 percent women.

The University’s last faculty diversity initiative, Mosaic, was taken in 2008. The $5 million, five-year plan resulted in little to no net gains for URM or women faculty members, which the Report on Faculty Composition revealed. This concern was later addressed in the University’s guiding document on diversity, the Roadmap on Diversity and Inclusion.

“Because faculty hiring decisions are shaped by formal and informal practices that vary across the university and can disadvantage diverse candidates, we must have in place a university-wide set of recruiting standards. We must look beyond usual and familiar networks for top-tier candidates and tackle more forthrightly the biases — conscious and unconscious — that can affect the search process,” the Roadmap wrote.

Interim Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer James Page commended the University for its united efforts toward improving transparency in the diversity initiative.

“The information provided gives a very intimate view as you get an inside look at data across each department and the school,” Page said. “Some institutions would refrain or shy away from releasing such information.”

Page also spoke about the increased accountability the report would provide, elaborating that it showed the University’s serious commitment to reform and change.

“Changes to the existing system should not be viewed as our instituting a numerical quota,” he said. “At Hopkins, we are trying to set up an institutionalized process, and our hope is that this becomes the way we conduct our searches going forward.”

Students responded to the FDI with mixed views. Sophomore Dong Ho Shin stated that although faculty diversity did indeed seem to be lacking, but the problem did not largely concern him as long as the professors taught well and were polite.

“If they use that money to scout for other professors, I don’t want quality to be lowered because they want a balance of races and genders,” Shin said.

Freshman Katie Raja, however, explained that for students, like herself, who come from a more diverse environment, the first impression of Hopkins professors can be slightly off-putting.

“It’s easy to connect to them when they are the same ethnicity as you are,” Raja said. “Where I come from in California is very diverse. It’s kind of odd, but it doesn’t really do anything.”

Sophomore Clarissa Chen elaborated that faculty diversity is not something on most students’ minds, but that students would develop an increased consciousness with institutional reforms.

“It seems like most people are white or not people of color,” Chen said. “It’s not something we think about on a daily basis, but if we get more diverse faculty, people will begin to notice it.”