Building a Cadre of Faculty Champions for Campus Diversity

A summary of JoAnn Moody’s remarks for the panel “Dilemmas of Being Senior Faculty.” Ford Foundation Fellows conference Oct. 2006, Wash., D.C. Copyright Moody, 2006. JoAnn Moody, PhD, JD, is a faculty developer & higher education consultant. www.DiversityOnCampus.com

A newly tenured faculty person often wonders: Now that I’m less vulnerable, how can I bring about changes in my department or on campus? If that newly tenured person is particularly interested in helping the campus become less mono-cultural, the question may take this form: What steps can I now take to bring about greater diversity of the student body or faculty ranks or curriculum? And the con-comitant dilemma may be: Should I undertake these steps alone, or with under-represented faculty, or with majority faculty?

Based on my consulting experience, I suggest this approach: bring together a group of minority and especially majority faculty and encourage them to build a “cadre” of advocates for diversity who coach one another. Because pro-diversity provosts, deans, and department chairs come and go, the policies and programs they institute also tend to come and go. Senior faculty endure—they are the key to sustainability. Depending on the campus, a cadre may be jumpstarted by an administrator or by a faculty member and take the form of a Diversity Council; a group of Equity Advisors coached by the provost or outside consultant; a series of Diversity Dialogues for faculty led by colleagues or external experts.

What key concepts, skills, and strategies are needed by the members of the cadre?

Recognize and rise above more than a dozen cognitive errors and shortcuts (e.g. raising the bar, seizing a pretext, negative stereotyping, positive stereotyping) that routinely contaminate evaluation processes and shortchange members of certain groups
Develop a variety of ways to help their colleagues on search, tenure-review, admissions, financial aid, and other evaluation committees recognize and rise above these errors
Learn how to reduce stresses that “solo” faculty (and students) often experience and coach colleagues to likewise take steps to reduce those stresses
Understand that mentoring, especially of vulnerable solo faculty and students, must focus on “critical inci-dents” that mentees experience; mentors should seek out information about hurtful episodes that are affect-ing mentees and then help to diminish the damage suffered
Be ready to defuse or answer predictable lines of resistance or confusion about campus diversity, such as we have to treat everyone the same--otherwise it’s reverse discrimination; to maintain a meritocracy, we can’t let excellence be sacrificed for the sake of diversity; all of us are immigrants in this country so any individual who works hard will succeed; all of us must be color-blind, gender-blind, and blind to group membership; the playing field is level at this point and the ‘bad old days’ are over.
Appreciate that different groups occupy different statuses and historical contexts: members of colonized minority groups (African-American, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican-American, American Indian, Native Hawaiian) usually have to deal with lower status and lower expectations for success than do immigrant mi-nority groups who have been incorporated into this country by choice, not by force. The highest status usu-ally belongs to the dominant group: members often enjoy positive stereotypes about their competency and worthiness and can accumulate lasting advantages over generations, in academe and other realms.

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