Studying the Academy
from Within
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”