Breaking the Status Quo Wheel: The Bro Code and the White Web in Faculty Hiring Search Committees

• In Event: Exploring the Unspoken Racialized Processes for Minoritized Tenure-Seeking Faculty

Abstract

This scholar studies how faculty hiring is a racial structure. Faculty search committee members use unquestioned hiring practices that reflect their organization’s existing cultural schemas that guide their behaviors to distribute resources by race. Faculty search committee members often devalue and over-scrutinize racially minoritized faculty candidates. Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) listed the following discursive practices that faculty search committee members use to exclude racially minoritized faculty candidates from hiring pools: the objective scrutiny of curriculum vitae (CV), the discourses of fit, the tokenization of committee members who advocate for racial equity, the additive nature of diversity-related interview questions, and the acceptance of candidates’ ignorance of race and equity issues (p. 559). The qualifications of racially minoritized applicants are further diminished if they did not earn their degrees at prestigious research universities, if their research or academic trajectory strays from field conventions, or if their appearance, presentation, interactive style, language, and other such characteristics are not deemed a “good fit” for the organization (Tuitt, Danowitz Sagaria, & Turner, 2007). Of course, the definition of "a good fit" is itself racially coded (Author & Author, forthcoming). Given that racial meanings guide organizational members to establish routines to determine who is worthy of receiving the organization’s social and material resources (Ray, 2019), achieving racial equity requires professors being comfortable addressing the impact of racism on everyday routines, the distribution of resources, racially minoritized groups, and themselves (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015).
Faculty hiring is an organizational routine with written and unwritten rules for search committee members to evaluate faculty candidates’ application materials and behaviors. Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) argue that faculty search committees protect rather than disrupt white ways of being by leaving them unmarked and invisible through a range of discursive practices. A race- and critical-conscious mindset is therefore needed to guide faculty search committee members to problematize the unnamed and exclusionary hiring practices. In this symposium, this scholar will present findings from an empirical research project where they studied faculty with training on equity-mindedness engaged in efforts to advance racial equity in faculty hiring. The researcher found that achieving racial equity in faculty hiring allowed professors to (1) establish positional power as search committee members, (2) use equity-minded templates to change the rules and roles in search committees, and (3) informally strategize with allies to overcome organizational constraints and resistance from committee members. Ultimately, the intersectional relations of power associated with race, gender, tenure, and discipline together shaped how these advocates were able to negotiate and resist biases in hiring. Conversations about hiring decisions were often dominated by what the researcher referred to as a “bro code” and “white homophily” that protected the status quo. This author will outline the various hiring practices and strategies faculty used to identify and disrupt racial biases throughout the hiring process.

Author

• Román Liera, Montclair State University