10/24/2016 The Next Step in Diversifying the Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Next-Step-in-Diversifying/238138 1/5 T Christophe Vorlet for The Chronicle COMMENTARY The Next Step in Diversifying the Faculty By Rafael Walker OCTOBER 23, 2016 hese days there’s no escaping discussions about the need to diversify academe. So it should be. A recent addition to this brimming conversation was a widely discussed essay in The Hechinger Report from Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, in which she argued that there aren’t more people of color on faculties for a simple reason: Colleges and universities don’t want them. Gasman’s essay certainly sheds light on the more deplorable side of the problem, but, at this late date, I do not believe it fair to conclude that all or even most institutions flatly do not want faculty members of color. The benefits of diversity are too familiar to us today to hold such a position. If we cannot attribute all of the hindrances to faculty diversity to discrimination, to what do we attribute the rest? I suspect that there may be a more unconscious and less damnable, if no less serious, side to the dilemma — one that has to do both with how we measure diversity and with how we mentor minority students. When we measure an institution’s diversity, we typically calculate the proportion of that institution’s faculty coming from historically underrepresented groups. Such calculations are also performed at the departmental level since, of course, if each of