If you have served on a faculty search committee recently, you know that we ask applicants to write a few different statements as part of their application – a statement on teaching, research, and these days, a statement on diversity.
We ask for these statements because we want to know if candidates have given thought to the work we expect of them. Have they developed effective teaching strategies for lectures and seminars? Can they tell us about times they implemented some of these ideas in their teaching in the past? Ditto for research. Do they have a solid plan for their future scholarship? Do they have a track record that suggests they will be successful at carrying out this plan?
These two types of candidate statements are so common that no one bats an eye. But geez, the diversity statement that the University of California asks for has certainly raised quite a kerfuffle.
A contributor to Forbes.com, Michael Poliakoff (who regularly writes about higher education) recently penned a concern that UC’s diversity statements might keep excellent researchers off of our faculty. Science also covered this controversy, focused how this is playing out in mathematics because the Vice President of the American Mathematical Society likened our diversity statements to loyalty oaths.
The argument against diversity statements tends to repeat this question: If Albert Einstein had written a poor diversity statement, would we have declined to offer him a position on the Berkeley faculty?
I posted a response to this on the FBF listserv suggesting a better hypothetical: suppose Einstein’s first wife had been given a professorship. Given that much of Albert’s groundbreaking work was done in close conversation with his scientist-spouse Mileva, perhaps she had just as much to offer intellectually; perhaps science would have moved in additional new directions had she been welcomed into the academy.
Imagine how much more we will all learn if the best minds from all socioeconomic groups, religions, ethnicities, genders, etc. are welcomed into the academy, and not just people with lots of socioeconomic and cultural privilege. It takes faculty with a plan to make this happen.
It’s like voting — if you have a plan for when and how you will get to the polls, and tell someone what that plan is, you are 4% more likely to vote on election day.
Berkeley prides itself on comprehensive excellence. We hire and promote each other for excellence in all aspects of what it means to be a professor – research, teaching, service. More recently, we have recognized that attention to diversity is part of comprehensive excellence. We regularly adjust our teaching to new generations of students and new technologies; in research, we reexamine prevailing wisdom. How do we welcome students from diverse backgrounds to bring even more ideas for the advancement of knowledge? How can we be effective mentors as these students pursue new questions in which we might lack expertise? Candidates who haven’t given much thought to the inclusive mission of a public university are unlikely to effectively advance this aspect of Berkeley’s goal for all-around excellence.
If every new faculty hire was at least 4% better at increasing diversity in academia compared to those of us who are already here, that would be a step in the right direction.
Leslea J. Hlusko, Professor of Integrative Biology