Clusterluck, a documentary short produced by Dr. Candace N. Hall, graduate program director and assistant professor for the higher education and student affairs program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), begins on a sobering note. White text on a black background tells us that African Americans make up only 5.4% of the full-time faculty in post-secondary education. As an unsettling synth beat plays, a quote from a recent study fades in: “Many institutions have recruited underrepresented scholars to join their faculty without attention to retaining and supporting the new recruits.”
Dr. Candace N. Hall, graduate program director and assistant professor for the higher education and student affairs program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Clusterluck is a portrait of the community that developed among faculty of color centered in the department of educational leadership at SIUE, several of whom were recruited in 2020 as part of a cluster hire—a deliberate attempt to appoint several faculty with similar backgrounds or research interests who can work together and, ideally, create a sense of belonging.
In assembling this cluster, Dr. Robin Hughes, dean of the SIUE School of Education, Health, and Human Behavior, succeeded wildly.
“I hadn’t anticipated anything like the environment of care that they created,” she says in the film. “It’s spectacular.”
Her most significant hire to the creation of this environment was Hall.
“She is so unselfish,” said Hughes. “She is so concerned about her academic siblings.”
