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Reconsidering the Pipeline Problem: Increasing Faculty Diversity February 10, 2016

Kimberly A. Griffin writes that a pathway is a better metaphor than a pipeline when considering

how to diversify college and university faculty. This is the third in a series sparked by recent

student protests and the national dialogue on diversity and inclusion.

Last fall, students protested on college and university campuses nationwide, demanding that

institutional leaders pay attention to the challenges Black students, and students of color in

general, regularly face.

While students engaged in various acts of resistance, one common strategy was to compose and

deliver a list of demands to their president. One demand in particular appeared on many lists and

has drawn a great deal of attention from the higher education community, the media, and others:

Students want significant increases in faculty diversity, most notably, more professors from

communities of color.

Increases in student diversity have not been matched in the faculty, and most campuses have

small numbers of Black, Latino and Native American professors. Many leaders have struggled

with how to develop strategies that will address this concern. Some institutions have dedicated

significant resources and initiated action plans to increase faculty diversity on their respective

campuses. However, many still struggle with developing plans and initiatives that will both

produce short-term results and long-term change.

Addressing the lack of diversity we see in academia first requires a clear understanding of the

root causes of the problem. As we engage in this discourse as a community, conversations and

strategies often turn to the “pipeline,” or the number of students from underrepresented

backgrounds entering and completing graduate programs, the prerequisite for pursuing a faculty

career.

In 2014, 13 percent of doctoral degree recipients were Black, Latino or Native American, up from

8 percent in 1994. Much of this growth was due to increases in the number of Latino graduate

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students. While increases in the number of students completing advanced degrees has indeed

been slow and attention in this area is warranted, I suggest that there are limitations to framing a

lack of faculty diversity as a purely a pipeline issue.

In some ways, using a pipeline metaphor limits the way that we think about increasing diversity.

David Asai, senior director of science and education programs at the Howard Hughes Medical

Institute, is one of many who critique the pipeline metaphor. He explains that student access and

retention, particularly for communities of color in science, are rarely linear processes. Pipeline

imagery focuses our attention on one point of entry into a potential field or career—and only one

possible outcome for success.

Calls for developing the faculty pipeline can make us hyper aware of how many students are

entering doctoral programs. Pipeline imagery allows us to assume that if we can get more

students to apply to Ph.D. programs, more will be admitted, more will finish and more will be

available to enter academic careers. Although this logic seems sound, many institutions have

invested a great deal of time, attention and resources in attracting student applicants, with very

little change in their graduate student population. Administrators who work on graduate diversity

argue that the struggle is not attracting students of color as applicants; the challenge is in whether

those students are admitted. In short, focusing on recruitment and the hiring of administrators to

cultivate a more diverse applicant pool will only have limited success if we do not reconsider and

address how talent is identified in the admissions process.

Julie Posselt’s work on the graduate admissions process suggests that committees often

embrace narrow definitions of merit, emphasizing students’ undergraduate institutions and GRE

scores. Posselt and others remind us that GRE scores are inconsistent predictors of success in

graduate school and emphasize that these criteria can limit the recognition of talented, high-

potential students of color. Coupled with recent initiatives by the Council of Graduate Schools on

holistic admission, this work pushes us to more closely attend to how we identify “rising stars” and

whether the process and our criteria make it more likely that we will miss talented candidates of

color.

The pipeline metaphor also creates a certain image of the progression from graduate school to an

academic career. A pipeline conjures a picture of a straight line from enrollment, through graduate

school, ending at a faculty position. However, a faculty career is not a given, and students’ level of

interest in being professors appears to decline throughout graduate school. While it is important

to honor individual agency and people choosing to align their work and their values, it is also

important to note that patterns of departure from the academy aren’t the same across all groups.

Our study of 1,500 biomedical scientists suggests that underrepresented minority trainees tended

to have lower levels of interest in pursuing a faculty career at a research university than White

and Asian trainees, even when they reported the same level of interest when starting graduate

school, time to degree, quality and quantity of publications, and perceived advisor support, which

were all variables measured in our study. This trend was particularly noticeable for women, who

reported the lowest levels of interest in faculty careers at research universities and the highest

levels of interest in pursuing non-academic careers. Our current research aims to explain why

these patterns emerge, and how people of color experience their training and make decisions

about leaving the academy.

Rather than focusing solely on increasing the number of people applying to or completing

graduate programs, we must see increasing faculty diversity as a multi-step process that involves

both institutional-level and systemic change. If we imagine a pathway to a faculty career instead

of a pipeline, multiple opportunities for intervention present themselves.

Understanding that recruitment includes encouraging applications, admissions and enrollment

allows institutional leaders to develop new programs and policies that recognize prospective

student talent. Also, a deeper understanding of the messages we send students about what it

means to be a professor and what faculty life is like, as well as whether they “fit” into the

academy, can lead to policies and programs that encourage students of color to reconsider faculty

careers.

Our research suggests the desire to support underserved communities, discover concrete

solutions to complex social problems, and develop the next generation of scholars of color

appears central to the career aspirations of many women and people of color. Determining how

these commitments can be incorporated into the values and reward structures of the academy

would likely increase these students’ interests in faculty careers. These strategies begin to shift

our focus from providing more scholars from diverse backgrounds with a potential opportunity to

pursue a faculty career to actively cultivating talent and encouraging talented trainees to become

professors. While there are no quick fixes, incorporating interventions that more directly address

graduate student recruitment and training can accelerate our progress toward greater diversity

and equity in the academy.