An Inclusive Academy Achieving Diversity and Excellence

How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand.

Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world—in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both.
 
Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members of the white male majority.
 
Perhaps most important, Stewart and Valian provide practical advice for overcoming obstacles to inclusion. This advice is based on their experiences at their own universities, their consultations with faculty and administrators at many other institutions, and data on institutional change. Stewart and Valian offer recommendations for changing structures and practices so that people become successful in ways that benefit everyone. They describe better ways of searching for job candidates; evaluating candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion; helping faculty succeed; and broadening rewards and recognition.

Abigail Stewart is Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the coauthor of Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women and coauthor of An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence (both published by the MIT Press).

Acknowledgments ix
Preface: Why This Book? xiii
I Why an Inclusive Academy Is Difficult to Achieve: Individual and Institutional Perspectives 1
1 Academic Ideals: What Keeps Some Out of Reach? 3
2 The Benefits of Diversity and Inclusion 41
3 Understanding Inequities: The Role of Schemas 71
4 How Careers Progress for Different Groups: Observational Data and Alternate Accounts 121
II How to Achieve an Inclusive Academy 167
5 Recruiting New Faculty: Developing a Diverse Pool and an Equitable Search Process 169
6 Evaluating Job Candidates: Choosing the Short List and Treating Interviewees Equitably 201
7 Retaining Faculty: Building Community in the Academic Workplace 243
8 Facilitating Faculty Success 289
9 Evaluating and Promoting Faculty 325
10 Recognizing Faculty Accomplishments 373
11 Changing Institutions: The Roles of Formal Leaders, Informal Leaders, and All Faculty 415
Conclusion: Making Institutional Changes That Last 449
Author Index 461
Subject Index 481