As a Black woman who studies the educational experiences of Black women and girls, Dr. Tiffany Steele says she always felt like her work was never quite valued.
“If you focus on minoritized populations, there’s a lack of understanding about why this research is relevant,” she says.
Editors of top-tier journals couldn’t comprehend why she chose to focus on Black women instead of Black people generally, and if she wanted to talk about Black women and girls in the courses that she taught, she had to figure out how to slip the material into the pre-designed curriculum. She was even told that she focused too much on race in a class about diversity.
The experience was isolating. Steele describes going to conferences with few sessions centering on Black women and having trouble finding mentors.
“We have to find those pockets of other researchers who are doing this work and creating spaces for ourselves,” she says.
But all of that changed in 2022, when Steele saw a listing for a job at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and Human Development. Rochester was looking to hire faculty whose work focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. And they weren’t looking to just hire one. They were hiring three.
Rochester was engaging in a cluster hire, the technique of simultaneously bringing on several faculty members with similar backgrounds or research interests in the hopes that they can work together and, if all goes well, create a sense of belonging. Cluster hiring instantly injects diversity into departments that have little, while making the experience easier for minoritized faculty members. Because several minoritized professors are being hired at once, they are less likely to be tokenized and burdened with extra diversity, equity, and inclusion work. And by providing support, mentoring, and a ready-made network of peers, clusters can help minoritized faculty avoid burnout and stay in their roles.
