From Racial Capitalism to Racialized Change: Analyzing the Purposes and Outcomes of Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiatives to Promote Racial Equity

• In Event: Resilient Pathways: Toward Political Theories of Action for Achieving Educational Equity

Abstract

Research on racial equity in faculty hiring has focused on reducing individual and group racial bias in recruitment and hiring practices (Gonzales et al., 2024; O’Meara et al., 2020). Like other problems in higher education (e.g., admissions, participation in STEM), hiring has been rhetorically framed around increasing representation in the professoriate. Unsurprisingly, our attention is most often directed toward how standard hiring processes are racialized to prevent diversification. For example, many universities have used varying tools, from hiring rubrics intended to standardize decision-making (Culpepper et al., 2023) and introduce equity-minded values (Liera, 2020) to “target-of-opportunity” hiring programs intended to recruit diverse candidates outside of traditional hiring (Gasman et al., 2011). At this sociopolitical juncture, we emphasize two shortcomings of such approaches. First, the hire-by-hire and largely voluntary nature of adopting equitable practices has often failed to create large-scale systemic change. Second, the political environment has introduced new constraints and fears about practices that focus explicitly on candidates’ identity demographics. By contrast, our ongoing empirical research on faculty cluster hiring (FCH) across six R1, Historically White Institutions (R1-HWIs) has surfaced an alternative theory of action. Whereas FCH still implicitly targets shifts in faculty demographics, we also note that FCH advances the same end via different means: an organized approach to shifting relevant hiring criteria and sources of power that determine desirable expertise in the academy.
We interrogate the theories of action underlying university leaders’ mobilization and design of FCH initiatives across multiple R1-HWIs and consider the extent to which they offer a promising pathway toward shifts in the academy’s structural power. FCH boosts support networks that reduce feelings of isolation, increase socialization, and improve retention of Faculty of Color (Sgoutas-Emch et al., 2016). Similarly, FCH may be one approach to fast-tracking a critical mass of Faculty of Color on campus, a critical factor for equitable organizational transformation (Griffin, 2020). We apply racialized change work as an analytic framework (McCambly & Colyvas, 2023) to understand and identify the racial frames and organizational routines that make it possible to create new structures that replace whiteness with equity-mindedness as the benchmark to determine the characteristics (e.g., content expertise, mentoring approach) that constitute a faculty member.
We will offer empirical evidence of how, as a portable strategy, FCH offers a potentially powerful tool for racialized change in the academy, even in the face of political opposition. Leaders in our study have described how their FCH policies address systemic barriers to increasing racial diversity in hiring and retaining racially minoritized faculty at a larger scale and in departments otherwise out of reach via traditional hiring initiatives. However, we will point to how the policy designs underpinning participants’ strategic use of race-conscious frames to shift faculty hiring criteria can either challenge or leave intact broader structures that legitimate whiteness in non-cluster hiring. Thus, we will discuss opportunities to use cluster hiring to catalyze racial equity while highlighting the limitations given the current socio-political context around racial equity.

Authors

• Heather N. McCambly, University of Pittsburgh

• Román Liera, Montclair State University

• Aireale J. Rodgers, University of Wisconsin - Madison