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Approaches to affirmative action/diversity hiring: the poll results

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 25–MANY INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME.  AND LAWYER READERS:  DO CONSIDER REPLYING TO QUESTION #12, BELOW, ABOUT EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION LAW, IF YOU'RE KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT IT

So we got more than 550 responses since late yesterday afternoon to the poll, and the results have been fairly stable now for awhile.  Here they are:

Which description is closest to your approach to diversity/affirmative action hiring for faculty positions?
Make affirmative efforts to identify and solicit applications from members of underrepresented groups, but then choose the candidate with the strongest academic qualifications without regard to group membership. 27%
 
 
Same as #1, except treat membership in an underrepresented group as a tie breaker when academic qualifications of candidates are basically the same. 51%
 
 
Same as #1, except treat membership in an underrepresented group as decisive as long as the candidate is above some threshold of strength in terms of academic qualifications. 13%
 
 
None of the above 9%
 
 
Total votes: 566

Remember that the poll was aimed at academics who believe in affirmative action/diversity hiring (for the difference between affirmative action and diversity, see this CHE essay of mine).

The first choice–which garnered 27% of the votes–expresses what I would think of as the minimal requirement for affirmative action, namely that one take affirmative actions to identify and solicit applications from members of the target groups (e.g., African-Americans).  

The second option–which got the biggest share of the vote, 51%, including my own vote–then treats membership in the underrepresented group as a tie breaker when academic qualifications are more or less equivalent.  Of course, there the devil is in the details of comparing academic qualifications, and different people will do that differently.

The third option is the most aggressive form of affirmative action/diversity action–and got 13% of the vote among readers here–since it treats academic qualifications as a kind of "floor," with group membership being the decisive factor.

My own observation is that many people, who profess something like the second option, often practice something closer to the third option.

I'd be interested in hearing from readers who chose "none of the above" about their own approach to affirmative action hiring; again, if you oppose any affirmative action practices (i.e., even option #1), then this poll wasn't for you.  What I'd like to know is how you approach affirmative action if it is not in the form of the first, second or third options.  Comments on the first three options are also welcome.

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15 responses to “Approaches to affirmative action/diversity hiring: the poll results”

  1. Balazs

    There is a difference between underrepresentation and discrimination: although the presence of underrepresentation is frequently a reliable sign of an underlying discrimination, it does not imply it. Although there is an increasing tendency to cast "affirmative action" as a set of policies/actions that seek to reduce *underrepresentation*, I venture that in its genesis "affirmative action" was rather supposed to seek to reduce *discrimination*. But regardless of the genesis of the concept, it is possible for someone to support "affirmative action" in the latter sense but not in the former. Such a person might not find either of your three positions compelling, although such a person might find one of the modified three positions, in which the term "underrepresented groups" is replaced with "discriminated groups", compelling. This is one way "none of the above" could come into play.

    Another possible reason for "none of the above": you included in all of your options making an effort to "solicit applications from members of underrepresented groups". One might support a version of these options without an explicit solicitation clause. There are reasons to believe that explicit solicitations (that emphasize that they are motivated by affirmative action) do damage and actually decrease the willingness of members of underrepresented/discriminated groups to apply.

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  2. Brian Leiter

    I'd be curious about evidence that soliciting applications decreases them.

    Reply
  3. Chronos

    I was a little unsure whether my view is best represented by the second or third option. I can imagine a departmental situation where there is some, but not decisive, need for a diversity hire, in which case option two makes sense. I can also imagine another situation where a diversity hire is really a priority, in which case option three makes sense. So perhaps it depends on the circumstances.

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  4. Daniel

    I picked "none of the above", and I consider my position to be in between 2 and 3. I think situations where candidates' academic qualifications are "basically the same" pretty much never arise. There are hard calls, and different candidates have different strengths. So I don't think I'm ever in a position to apply a "tiebreaker". But that doesn't mean that I treat membership in an underrepresented group as decisive as long as a candidate is above a threshold.

    I think of membership in an underrepresented group as one among many factors that weighs in hiring. Past publication record, filling areas of need in the department, promise of future research program, teaching–these all count. For most positive features of an application–a publication in a prestigious journal, for example–it would seem like an odd, false dichotomy to ask whether that positive feature is (a) just a tiebreaker when all else is equal or else (b) presumptively decisive as long as the candidate clears some minimum threshold. Same thing here.

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  5. Luke

    "My own observation is that many people, who profess something like the second option, often practice something closer to the third option."

    This is highly likely and fits my observations as well. The ongoing litigation at Harvard revealed the university confers very large advantages to Black applicants — Black students in the 4th to 5th academic decile are admitted at higher rates than Whites and Asians in the 10th (top) decile. These are not "tie-breakers" in any sense. One has to assume something very similar is happening in University hiring committees. Conferring such large advantages may or may not be warranted (I can definitely see why some think they are justified). But conferring large advantages while professing to only endorse tie-breakers is dishonest.

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  6. Dan

    It seems to me that which of these approaches is correct depends in some ways on context. For example, in a department made up entirely or almost entirely of men (for example, because of a string recent departures by women), the urgency of getting back some sort of gender balance might justify an approach closer to #3, even if the same approach would be less justified for a department closer to gender parity. Exactly which contexts justify which approaches would of course be a matter of substantive debate.

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  7. Anon

    I suppose I’m a 1 with the misgiving that philosophical qualifications don’t strike me as the kind of things that are easily quantifiable and comparable, but I can see the rationale for building a department with a variety of strengths, perspectives, and abilities—including the differences in personal history that come with differences in race and gender.

    But, given this rationale, I’m curious why “underrepresented groups” are always thought of exclusively as racial or gender groups. There are lots of groups underrepresented in academic philosophy: veterans, pantheists, the poor, former college athletes, Republicans, Kentuckians… Some of these categories are more compelling and worthy of consideration to me than others. But I have never seen any effort whatsoever to recruit anyone from one of these underrepresented groups. If you need asian american philosophers to show asian american students that philosophy is for them too, then of course you need veteran faculty members to show the ROTC students that philosophy is for them as well. So why aren’t we doing it?

    My hypothesis is that the explanation is institutional, not philosophical. College boards evaluate the performance of the president and provost (in part) on the basis of the number of non-white, non-male faculty they hire, but not on the number of veterans. People respond to the incentives, so the president tells the dean to hire more women and people of color, the dean tells the department “i’m not sure we can support this tenure line in the budget unless this is a diversity hire”. If this is right, then it would be expected that most people would actually be doing #3 even if they claimed to be doing 2.

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  8. Peter Carruthers

    On the "other" option: one can give a candidate from an underrepresented minority group an (almost) automatic boost on the teaching front. Provided their teaching is above a minimal level of competence, it will be beneficial for some students in the classroom to have a role model, and beneficial for the others to see an out-group member in an authoritative and competent role. Moreover, evidence of teaching quality and underrepresented status should combine in a multiplicative, rather than merely additive manner — the better the teaching is, the more effective a role model the person will be.

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  9. David Shoemaker

    Most people take the tiebreaker move to be relevant only at the final stage of hiring, when you have 2-3 candidates who are roughly equal "on paper," and so it's only at that point that race/gender is thought to be legitimate as a tiebreaker. The majority of folks in your poll like this route. But a tie can take place at a variety of spots along the way to the finalist vote. Indeed, one may, I think, satisfice along the way to generate several such ties: Determine a pool of candidates who are "good enough" for interviewing, say, then after that a pool of candidates "good enough" for campus visits, and subsequently a pool of candidates "good enough" for hiring. At each stage, you've got a kind of satisficing tie, at which point you could, using the reasoning most of your readers favor, maximize across other departmental values to break them, including diversity/inclusivity (and other department values as well). This might well have the effect of generating a finalist pool for which there is no need to appeal to diversity/inclusivity at all.

    Reply
  10. pets and vets

    To Anon above,
    Some colleges do aim to recruit vets. Indeed, I experienced this. A candidate's file was given consideration because they were a vet – indeed, they were also qualified. But their vet status certainly was a consideration. In fact, this person was hired, and they also were subsequently involved in outreach on our campus to other vets. I do not know if they made much difference to philosophy students, specifically. But they were a great mentor for other students who had served in the military.

    Reply
  11. Phil Edwards

    As I commented on Twitter, #1 as presented doesn't actually exclude #2, as it assumes that it will be possible to choose the 'strongest' candidate in purely academic terms. For a clean break between the categories, #1 would need to read something like

    Make affirmative efforts to identify and solicit applications from members of underrepresented groups, but then choose the candidate with the strongest academic qualifications without regard to group membership; in the unlikely event of a tie, choose the 'winner' by coin-toss.

    But spelt out like that it's not very attractive.

    Perhaps the underlying question is whether people think it's even possible to identify somebody's qualifications as 'the best' in academic terms (as distinct from 'good enough to put them in consideration'):

    #1: certainly in principle and hopefully in practice
    #2: yes in principle, but in practice ties are likely
    #3: no, it's just a matter of setting a threshold and then maximising whatever you want to maximise

    Reply
  12. Anonymous Junior Person

    I was a bit surprised to see so many people admit to doing more than #1. My impression was that even #2 violates most universities' nondiscrimination policies and was illegal in the U.S. I wonder if some legally or other institutionally informed readers might be able to shed some light here.

    Title VII says that "an unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice" (https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964). The Department of Labor says that universities' affirmative action obligations as federal subcontractors do not allow "the use of race to be weighed as one factor among many in an individual’s application when rendering hiring, employment or personnel decisions, as racial preferences of any kind are prohibited under the authorities administered by OFCCP" (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs). What am I missing here?

    Apart from the legal issue, my own institution's DEI compliance office has told me that it violates our university's nondiscrimination policies to consider a candidate's race or gender once they have applied, even as a "tiebreaker." That's why HR doesn't pass that information along to hiring committees. I would be interested to hear whether individuals or departments who practice #2 or #3 have actually consulted their compliance offices about this, and what their institutions' policies are.

    Reply
  13. V. Alan White

    Just to put in a data point: over my career at a 4/4 I participated in quite a few hirings for my department. My department was shall we say diversity starved–while we did manage to hire and retain *one* woman in my near 40-year career, who was a star in the classroom but actually loved where she lived, so we luckily kept her, we lost another because we used something like the #2 as a criterion, but being an excellent philosopher, she got poached for a much nicer position. So we had 2 women in a 18-or-so otherwise white male department over that time. My point is that getting a diverse department is partly a function of your institution's attractiveness to candidates, and being a 4/4 is inherently a disadvantage. And please take a look at how many 4/4s there are in the US. So in some ways having options as the poll suggests is simply not a realistic representation of alternatives for many departments, even if they aggressively pursue diversity goals.

    Reply
  14. Sean

    As an imperfect test of the breadth and depth of AA/diversity hiring policies in philosophy, it will be interesting to see how many of the most desired junior jobs this year's particularly competitive cycle (UNC, JHU, Berkeley, Toronto, etc…) went to candidates who satisfy diversity criteria.

    Reply
  15. Anon Please

    At my institution, this is driven by the admin, and there’s a pretty hard push for 3. The mechanism is simple: “we don’t really think we have $ for normal searches, but if you could bring us a diversity candidate….”

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