Faculty Diversity

Faculty diversity is the representation of various social and ethnic identities within academe. The underrepresentation of ethnic faculty is important to explore, as it reveals and highlights social disparity with varying levels of underlying social advantage or position reflected by economic resources, educational gaps, and privileged access. Research reflects that postsecondary students comprise over 50% students of color, while faculty of color represents less than 15%.

Faculty diversity has been a Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) accreditation standard for colleges and universities since the 20th century. There is also a standard that requires faculty to be a representative of the student body. However, after many decades, and as the 21st century progresses, the evolution toward meeting these accreditation standards has been slow, with virtually no substantial progress made; in effect, visible signs of underrepresented faculty of color attaining full-time faculty or tenured positions are exiguous. CACREP vital statistics from 2012 to 2018 reflect faculty of color holding 10–14% of full-time positions, compared to over 70% of white faculty, across the United States.

As accreditation standards require the academic unit at colleges and universities to make continuous and systematic efforts to recruit, employ, and retain a diverse faculty to create and support an inclusive learning environment, the greater challenge is arriving at a shared understanding of what constitutes diversity. Although faculty diversity is reflected in the ideas and perceptions of others, which often will include bias, this intrinsically reflects the spirit of diversity, meaning the state of having a range of different things, variety. However, faculty diversity is not simply reflected by one category, such as professional expertise, gender, religious practices, sexual orientation, or a specific social justice focus. These diversity categories have been presented by academic units to demonstrate their unique way of putting forth effort in meeting the faculty diversity standard for accreditation.

Because targeted efforts in achieving faculty diversity have been loosely interpreted, without direct language that defines or describes specific elements of diversity, meeting the faculty diversity standard continues to be elusive, as evidenced by the statistical data and research. Therefore, there this entry discusses the need to specifically define faculty diversity within accreditation standards, as well as the need for institutions to shift away from practices that make faculty diversity a relative concept to their immediate environment, which invariably results in a reflection of marginalization, as statistics reflect ongoing cultural bias based on the numbers of ethnic minority faculty being hired and retained in academe.

The underrepresentation of ethnic faculty is further explored by looking at current systematic practices of institutions that maintain the status [Page 570]quo of privilege. Some institutions may need to take corrective action accreditation standards to recruit, hire, and retain diverse faculty. Per CACREP standards, institutions must demonstrate not only systematic efforts but also a documented systematic plan to recruit and retain faculty of color.