Recently, when I was asked to appear on a Diverse sponsored panel at the recent AAC&U annual meeting on the best practices of attracting, hiring and retaining diverse faculty and administrators, I approached it from a journalist’s perspective.
I simply asked the most senior people I knew among my acquaintances around the country about the subject. I talked to people who have served on hiring committees at the department and university level. I talked to some who have been around long enough to see how diversity policies have both expanded and contracted over decades. And then I gave my sources full anonymity so as to be free to express exactly what the problems are and how to mitigate them so as to qualify as a “best practice.”
Emil Guillermo
What I thought would be fairly simple isn’t.
And that’s because as my sources put it, every school is geo-culturally limited, locked into different standards for what “diversity” means. And that is just one item in a proverbial list of “dirty little secrets.”
When it comes to diversity in institutions, as the saying goes, your mileage will vary. How else could you have a situation at Purdue Northwest, where Chancellor Thomas Keon could use a mocking Asian accent and get away with it at a graduation?
