This very special workshop features Dr. Marybeth Gasman in a dialogue about her book, Doing the Right Thing: How Colleges and Universities Can Undo Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring. The book published by Princeton University Press is described here. In an effort to increase faculty diversity at Mount Holyoke College, we’ve invited faculty search committee chairs and their colleagues to engage in this dialogue.

While colleges and universities have been lauded for increasing student diversity, these same institutions have failed to achieve any comparable diversity among their faculty. In 2017, of the nation’s full-time, tenure-track and tenured faculty, only 3 percent each were Black men, Black women, Hispanic men, and Hispanic women. Only 6 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander men, 5 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander women, and 1 percent were American Indian/Alaska Native. Why are the numbers so abysmal? In Doing the Right Thing, Marybeth Gasman takes a hard, insightful look at the issues surrounding the recruitment and hiring of faculty of color. Relying on national data and interviews with provosts, deans, and department chairs from sixty major universities, Gasman documents the institutional forces stymieing faculty diversification, and she makes the case for how such deficiencies can and should be rectified.

Speaker: Dr. Marybeth Gasman