At Yale, the struggle is real. In the last few years, the elite institution and treasured talent pipeline to the U.S. State Department, has experienced waves of student protests calling for a more diverse faculty and curriculum. But students have also demanded other things: that all undergrads be required to take an ethnic studies class, that mental health support services be offered through the cultural centers for minority students, and, most painfully, that Calhoun College, named for a white supremacist and ardent defender of slavery, be renamed. The university declined to do so.
This week, Yale’s troubles bubbled to the surface again, this time with charts and graphs and from within faculty ranks. An ad hoc committee of Yale’s Senate of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences published a “Report on Faculty Diversity and Inclusivity in FAS,” a 72-page investigation that education experts have described as “devastating” and “unsparing.” The report examines four decades of diversity initiatives, hiring practices, and retention rates, and will provide diversity and inclusion officers from every sector both a rich dataset and a cautionary tale. “Rather than overt ill will,” the report states, “we see an accumulated pattern of thousands of small decisions at all levels — decisions that persistently, if largely unconsciously, have cast the diversity of the faculty as a lower priority in times of strict budget austerity.”
Yale first began to recruit faculty from diverse backgrounds in 1972, and the report does mention that the university has made some progress. Currently, women are better represented across departments and racial minorities saw an uptick in hiring from 1999 to 2007. But the economic downturn reversed the gains—by 2012, only 22 of 56 recently hired minority faculty members remained. At the heart of the issue is a managerial roundabout described in detail by the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywall, sorry) that will be familiar to many: “Form a committee in reaction to a crisis, pledge to diversify the faculty, and then fail to follow through with action and resources needed to sustain progress.”