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Wheaton Does Diversity
The English department wanted diversity. It recruited imaginatively and hired two African American faculty members.
By Paula M. Krebs
Last academic year, the faculty and students at Wheaton College, a liberal arts institution in Massachusetts, took a hard look around and concluded that putting "AA/EOE" in our ads was not good enough. We had to get more serious if we wanted a faculty that even remotely reflected the diversity of the United States into which our students would be graduating. So, as part of a campuswide initiative, we in the English department tried some new recruitment techniques. Our administration encouraged us, even arranging a workshop at which we heard from minority faculty from other institutions. These visitors gave us valuable tips on recruiting, hiring, and retaining faculty of color.
In the years preceding our new strategy, we had been a department of nine or ten white people and one person of color. The slot filled by an African American each year was, however, off the tenure track; it was a renewable short-term line for a creative writer. We decided that if we wanted, among other goals, to attract minority students to our major, we would have to show a real commitment to minority hiring.
So, working with the administration, we converted that creative writing slot to a tenure-track position that receives a course release for advising minority students. When a college has few African American faculty members, they spend a lot of time advising minority students, and we found that official recognition of that extra workload went a long way toward attracting qualified candidates of all backgrounds who had had experience advising minority students. Another decision we made about searches was that we would move quickly for all finalists. We extended some invitations for campus visits before candidates even left the Modern Language Association convention, where we conducted initial interviews. This strategy proved especially valuable: our top candidates for two jobs knew how serious we were about them; we became a standard against which they compared the enthusiasm and seriousness of other institutions.
Once our candidates came to campus, just days after the convention, we pulled out all the stops. We wined and dined them as enthusiastically as we would any candidate for a top administrative post-not with lots of money but with lots of attention to what we thought they'd want to know. The creative writer with an interest in theater got a backstage tour of the top-notch repertory theater in nearby Providence. For the candidate who specializes in eighteenth-century British and French novels, we arranged meetings with the eighteenth-century specialist from the French department and an eighteenth-century British art historian from a nearby university. Our candidate established an immediate rapport with both of these non-English-department folks.
We had not made it a habit to involve "outsiders" in English department searches in the past, but with the new searches, we realized that at Wheaton, community is one of our strongest selling points-why not demonstrate that and take advantage of it? As our campus is in a mostly white New England town, we don't have a large local African American community. Instead, we highlighted the kinds of academic and social communities we can offer, and we introduced the candidates to Providence, Boston, and Cambridge. One new hire wanted to live in Cambridge, even if it meant a long commute; for another, we arranged campus housing while she determined where she'd like to settle.
In addition to our two tenure-track hires, we are bringing a doctoral fellow to the department next year through Grinnell College's fellowship program, Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence. The selection of the fellow represents another recruitment strategy: when you have a fabulous undergraduate, keep in touch after graduation. Our new fellow is a Wheaton alumnus.
People from other institutions keep asking us how we won out in the "bidding wars" for African American candidates. But our experience is that these bidding wars are for the most part a myth. Our candidates did not ask for inflated salaries. They responded, instead, to being valued for what they had to offer our community. Genuine commitment and enthusiasm from a college and a department can be very seductive when you're considering which job to take. So no matter who our top candidates are, we'll be using these techniques from now on.
Paula Krebs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College (Massachusetts).
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