What do College Diversity Officers do? George Leef writes:
Four Baylor University economists, Steven Bradley, James Garven, Wilson Law, and James West looked for any statistical evidence to show that having a CDO did anything to increase the hiring of “underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups” for faculty positions. […]
Their conclusion: “Using a wide variety of robust specifications, we are unable to find significant evidence that the presence of an executive level CDO alters preexisting trends of increasing faculty and administrator diversity.”
The key phrase here is “preexisting trends.” Pressure to hire more minority faculty and administrators has been a fact of life in American higher education for many years. Most deans and provosts have been on board with the diversity agenda for decades and don’t need additional prodding from a CDO to hire applicants who, because of their ancestry, “add to diversity” rather than applicants who don’t.
One obvious reason why hiring a CDO won’t necessarily lead to more faculty diversity is the limited number of minority individuals who have the necessary credentials. The authors observe that there is a limited supply of diverse PhD job candidates for faculty positions and further that roughly half of those who do accept employment outside of academia. “Despite widespread desire to increase faculty diversity, it simply may not be possible to rapidly increase faculty diversity given the pool of available candidates,” state the authors.
In other words, it’s impossible for every college to become more “diverse” no matter how vigorous its CDO may be.
[George Leef, “What Do ‘College Diversity Officers’ Accomplish?” The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, October 26]
