Doing the Right Thing

Colleges and universities have earned praise for diversifying their student bodies, yet their faculties tell a different story. In 2017, Black men, Black women, Hispanic men and Hispanic women each made up only 3 percent of full-time tenure-track and tenured faculty nationwide. Asian/Pacific Islander men accounted for 6 percent, Asian/Pacific Islander women for 5 percent, and American Indian/Alaska Native faculty for 1 percent.

In Doing the Right Thing, Marybeth Gasman asks why the figures are so low by examining how faculty of color are recruited and hired. She draws on national data and on interviews with provosts, deans and department chairs at sixty major universities to document the institutional forces that hold back faculty diversification, and she argues that these shortcomings can and should be fixed.

Institutions openly promote inclusive excellence, and the number of doctoral students of color keeps growing, yet Gasman shows what keeps the faculty status quo in place. The obstacles include the supposed trade-off between quality and diversity, the weight given to pedigree, inflexible academic pipelines, weak administrative leadership, little accountability among administrators and faculty, and a hiring process that is opaque and arbitrary. She contends that leaders must admit their institutions' failures of inclusion, the systemic racism that pervades them, and the biases that discourage people of color from pursuing faculty careers.

Starting from the view that people of every background are essential to creating and teaching knowledge, the book makes a concrete case that colleges and universities must take action and do better.