\Q & A\

Studying the Academy

from Within

By Rebecca Raber
Assistant Professor Damani White-Lewis’ research investigates why university faculty still lack racial diversity and seeks pathways towards equity in higher education.
D

amani White-Lewis, who joined the Penn GSE faculty last summer, studies racial inequality in academic careers. He focuses his research on higher education, examining hiring, retention, and tenure for faculty of color and asking questions about why the sector, which claims to want racial diversity in its professoriate, has been so slow to change.

His dissertation, “The Facade of Fit and Preponderance of Power in Faculty Search Processes: Facilitators and Inhibitors of Diversity,” was showered with honors from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, the American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education.

His current research includes a National Science Foundation–supported study on how tenure reviewers weigh candidates’ diversity, equity, and inclusion work, as well as a series of studies that uses data from Harvard’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education to interrogate trends in faculty retention.

White-Lewis spoke with us about this work, why university faculties are still so white, and how hopeful he is that it can change.

Photo credit: Stuart Goldenberg for Penn GSE
How did you come to this work?
When I was in grad school, the faculty diversity discourse looked incredibly intimidating [to me]. I was familiar with a lot of the typical excuses, but because I was a graduate student, I wasn’t confident that I could break past the noise and insert my voice. I would hear things like, “It’s the pool; there aren’t enough graduate students of color.” Even when there were graduate students of color, I would then hear, “Well, they probably want to go into better-paying industry jobs versus academia.” And even when candidates of color were clear they wanted to go into academia, I would hear that “only the best institutions can get them.”

Thinking about this systemically, these are excuses we’ve erected at every point pre-hire that failed to implicate the institutions doing the actual hiring. So we painted more of a supply-and-demand concern, rather than an equity, selection, and evaluation concern—not to say that demand and supply don’t have anything to do with it, but it’s an incomplete picture.

Later in grad school I did a paper for a course, and it was really interesting. I applied a “fit theory” to understand whether or not search committee members were actually evaluating for fit, which is now the paper I’m essentially most known for that appeared in The Journal of Higher Education. . . I made that initial graduate school paper my dissertation. It kind of blew up, and then I never really looked back.

You have said that calibrating hiring rubrics with equity considerations is one possible way to mitigate bias in the hiring process. What does that look like, practically?
Calibration is just an acknowledgement that we’re all starting from a different playing field (e.g., graduate training, disciplinary norms), and that when we review applications, if we fail to acknowledge those different playing fields and find a way to identify a baseline starting value, then [someone’s research] that I may consider rigorous, somebody else may also not consider rigorous. And the reason why that’s important is because we all have different levels of access to power—institutional and departmental power. [Things like] whether somebody’s been in the department for some time or identity characteristics, like being white and male, increase our power.

So it’s not just that we have different assessments, it’s that there is power behind those differential assessments that impact who gets equitably evaluated and selected. What calibration does is it helps us get all on the same page, so that if somebody has 10 publications, we say, “That meets our benchmark. That’s an important thing that relates to our organizational goal.” It helps us bypass our idiosyncratic preferences. And it helps ensure that no one powerful person’s criteria are overweighed or overvalued relative to somebody else’s.

“Calibration is just an acknowledgement that we’re all starting from a different playing field.”
The National Center for Education Statistics found that nearly three-quarters of full-time faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions in 2020 were white. So there is a disconnect between how much higher education says it wants to diversify the professoriate versus how white it still is. Why is that?
There’s a number of different complex industries where we have expressed stated goals and more lofty, aspirational goals, and sometimes the ways in which we get at the two conflict, right? That’s what I find in this discourse. I think there are very few uppercase-B “Bad,” nefarious people who are stroking their mustaches, saying they’re really going to mess this search up for the department.

When I try to take a systems look at it, looking at the entire range of a faculty member’s career, and then try to disaggregate hiring, promotion, and tenure, I start to drill down and see the complexities within a very seemingly mundane but interesting process such as faculty hiring . . . It’s competing priorities, risk aversion, and an inattention to race consciousness.

I think, unfortunately, some of the best ways to increase equity are either not publicly popular, or they may not even be permissible. And so, oftentimes, people have to come up with different ways to try to get something that they say that they want—or may aspire to—but in practice, it just doesn’t work out that way.

You began this research in your master’s program. In the years since, have you seen improvement? Are you hopeful that it can change?
Absolutely. I don’t think you can do this work and not feel hopeful because you’d feel defeated. It’s an interesting question, though. Yes, I’ve seen change. But I think what motivates me to keep doing my work is interrogating the rate of change. . . Some people take it real slow, some people are a lot more expedient, and that’s based on our perception of progress and racial ideologies.

There’s actually an interesting concept that comes from political science known as the Overton window, and the basic premise is that there’s a window of acceptable public policy that politicians are willing to endorse. Things that lie outside of the Overton window are seen as unpopular or infeasible, unless there’s a shift in public opinion. For example, we’re now having much different conversations, compared to decades ago, about important topics like redistributive justice.

I think we all—faculty included—have personal Overton windows. I focus on those windows that impact the faculty diversity discourse—ideas about what are acceptable initiatives toward change, and what we’re willing to do to obtain them. So, of course, there has been progress and there have been changes, but I think what my work compels me to do [is ask], “Are we doing enough?”

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