Studies have shown that increasing the number of underrepresented minority faculty will lead to both growth in minority student enrollment at the schools and more widespread teaching on diverstiy-related aspects of public health issues, which will contribute to public health program and school efforts to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities.
According to data reported to ASPH in 2006, of the more than 3,800 public health faculty members, fewer that 5 percent are African-American; 7 percent are Hispanic; and about 0.5 percent is Native American. In addition, anecdotal reports from minority faculty members indicate that they are their minority faculty members indicate that they and their minority colleagues are sometimes hired by sister schools or programs, thereby increasing the number of minority faculty members at one institution while decreasing the number at another.
It has become clear that several obstacles exist as public health faculty composition strives to reflect the population as a whole. These challenges need to be addressed on the following frontiers: minority faculty recruitment, the retention of these faculties, and providing sufficient resources to allow for tenure and promotion.
Recruitment & Retention
As detailed in the ASPH Health Disparities Report, the following objectives serve as a guideline for best practice for the recruitment and retention of minority faculty members.
- Increase the number of racial and ethnic minority faculty members in public health schools and programs, with the goal of reflecting the demography of the national population.
- Increase the number of racial and ethnic minority leaders within public health schools and programs (e.g. administrators, committee chairs, department chairs, associate deans, deans).
- Offer faculty appointments to practitioners who work with racial and ethnic minority communities.
- Provide junior racial and ethnic minority faculty members with the opportunity to have mentors and reviewers read their papers and grant applications, thus assisting in their career development.
- Encourage rachial and ethnic minority junior faculty members to take advantage of current institutional research support mechanisms.
Furthermore, the issue extends past simply the recruitment of minority faculty. At the ASPH/Kellogg Minority Faculty Retreat convened in January 2006, underrepresented minority faculty members discussed this topic and expressed the need for support throughout the faculty development pipeline as a major factor in the retention of minority faculty.
Appropriate institutional support plays a critical role in the upward mobility track of minority faculty. Faculty mentoring programs, for example, are vitally important to all junior faculty -- but perhaps more so to minority faculty members who are often pulled to multiple commitments and asked to serve in other ways that can distract from the work that they need to perform to earn tenure and promotions.
To qualify for a promotion, a faculty member must fulfill a set of criteria that includes publishing journal articles, taching, providing service to the school and university, and, of course, securing research funding. Because underrepresented minority faculty are often under pressure to represent their respective minority group for a myriad of grants and committees, time and resources are often stretched thin -- sometimes at a personal loss to the faculty member's own career development.
Encouraging junior minority faculty to tap into existing institutional support mechanisms can be very useful in helping faculty meet their research goals. For example, the University of Pittsburgh (through the School of Medicine) has implemented a Survival Skills system that includes a mentoring team to provide technical assistance with the institutional review board process, as well as a senior faculty member to serve as an ongoing scientific mentor to help develop an NIK K Award proposal (for an NIK-funded career development award). The University of Pittsburgh is one of eight universities in the country that has an internal K Award process funded by NIH.
Additionally, offering faculty appointments to practitioners who work with racial and ethnic minority communities brings a strong field perspective to the world of academia. Dr. Antronette Yancey, now at the University of California at Lose Angeles, served as Director of Public Health for Richmond, Virginia, and as Director of Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Many public health practitioners make the successful transition to academic life, augmenting the caliber of univerisity staff and backgrounds.
In many cases, however, once the public health professional becomes a full-time faculty member, the associated workload impedes maintenance of a position in public health practice. Current public health practitioners often serve as adjuncy faculty members at SPHs, and some practitioners work with SPH faculty colleagues on specific projects such as mentoring students or lecturing in various courses.
Tenure & Promotion
Although the recruitment and retention of minority faculty is an important first step, institutions need to follow-up by providing the necessary resources to achieve tenure and promotion. The following objectives, as prescribed in the ASPH Health Disparities Report, are a starting point:
- Charge department chairs with responsibility for reviewing with new faculty the criteria for tenure and promotion and also encourage periodic reviews to assess progress and the need for additional help.
- Assign a senior faculty member to junior faculty members to assist them in developing strategic plans for tenure and promotion and to meet periodically with them to monitor progress.
- Educate members of the promotion and tenure committees about community-engaged scholarship to inform their reviews of community-engaged faculty members.
- Change tenure and promotion committee policies to recognize and reward community-engaged scholarship.
When seeking to improve faculty recruitment and retention, tenure and promotion policies are critical, ultimately reflecting the values and culture of the institution. One method that the ASPH Kellogg Taskforce recommends in encouraging faculty to address racial and ethnic health disparities is to value, or incorporate incentives, for faculty to be community-engaged professionals. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is recognized as a useful approach in researching and eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities. By valuing faculty member service and practice in rank promotion and tenure policies and reviews, institutions encourage and emphasize the importance of public health faculty involvement in national, state, and community health policy and reform discussions.
The Community Campus Partnership for Health, CCPH, is piloting a project called the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. This project has generated several products, namely a Review, Promotion, and Tenure Analysis Protocol that established nine criteria and statements by which to assess school or university review, promotion and tenure guidelines.
Furthermore, a number of institutions have already made strides to reward public health practice in their promotion and tenure guidelines. The ASPH Council of Public Health Practice Coordinators (Practice Council) produced a document, "Examples of Academic Public Practice-Based Promotion and Tenure Guidelines at Accredited Schools of Public Health," re-releaseed in October 2006. This document outlines the existing promotion and tenure protocols at seventeen accademic institutions. Some flagship examples include:
- The Emory University Rollins School of Public Health defines service as professional service to the school, university, community, professional organizations, various levels of government, and national and international public health community.
- The University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health guidelines state, "Candidates [for professor] must have demonstrated substanial contributions in professional and public service or public health practice. The individual should be an active participant in intramural and extramural service, thus furthering the stated missions of MEXCOPH and the University.
- The University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine includes the definition of academic public health practice in its promotion and tenure guidelines as well as a grid in an appendix that details how to document contributions to public health practice.
These programs provide resources and examples for schools that are considering modifying their tenure and promotion guidelines to be more inclusive of public health practice and community-engaged scholarship. Such programs can increase the number of racial and ethnic minority professionals who succeed and thrive in their academic careers, which in turn can encourage racial and ethnic minority members to enter faculty positions in public health.
Resources for Faculty Recruitment
The following faculty recruitment resources may be helpful outlets for institutions seeking to augment diversity amongst their faculty.
Widely advertise positions using:
- National Journals associated with a specific discipline and/or
- National higher education news organizations
- Web-based journals, including the following:
- Other E-resources:
Search or register with databases/directories, suggested ones include:
- Minority and Women Doctoral Directory (MWDD). MWDD is a registry that maintains up-to-date information on employment candidates who have recently received, or are soon to receive, a Doctoral or Masters degree in their respective field from one of approximately two hundred major research universities in the United States.
- National Minority Faculty Identification Program (NMFIP). An online service to member institutions and minority candidates seeking first-time or advanced faculty positions in higher education. Member institutions can search the database and download the desired vitae.
- The New England Directory of African-American, Latino/a, Native American and Asian American Doctoral Scholars (NEBHE). The NEBHE is a Directory of advanced graduate students of color who are in the last phase of the doctoral work at various campuses. Students listed here express a strong interest in joining the professoriate.
- Academic360. This Web site is a collection of Internet resources pulled together for people interested in academic positions. It includes links to faculty, staff, and administrative announcements. It provides direct links to job announcements from nearly 1,800 colleges and universities in the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK.
Contact Professional Associations, such as:
The following are links where to post positions for African American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and Women, along with Periodicals/Listservs/Newsgroups. They are also good resources for faculty members of these demographics.
- African American
- Asian
- Hispanic
- Native American
- Women
- General Diversity Links
- Related Topics, Programs and/or Publications:
- Diversifying the Faculty by Caroline S.V. Turner
Diversifying the Faculty offers practical strategies for institutions interested in enhancing their faculty diversity. Best and promising hiring practices from a variety of institutions are interspersed throughout the text, and an extensive annotated bibliography and several appendices are included to help search committees and institutional leaders in this important challenge.
- Shattering the Silences
Shattering the Silences is a documentary film that explores issues of faculty diversity in American higher education. The film illustrates ways in which teaching and research by scholars of color affect students, university communities, and the academic disciplines in which they work, and the triumphs and disappointments they encounter in their personal lives and academic careers. Ordering information is available through California Newsreel, phone: 415/621-6196.
- Compact for Faculty Diversity
Seeks to increase the number of minority students who qualify to teach in higher education. Program goals include securing multi-year financial aid for graduate students, building a culture of support for diversity on campus, providing mentoring and training for effective teaching, and building coalitions with other national programs.
- Southern Regional Education Board
Member of the Compact for Faculty Diversity that works with 16 member states to increase faculty diversity. SREB's Doctoral Scholars program works to increase the number of minority students earning doctorates in fields where they are most underrepresented. SREB also helps states establish independent, self-sustaining funding to support the Doctoral Scholars.
- Illinois Consortium for Equal Opportunity Program
This group provides two different programs for undergraduate and graduate students aimed at increasing the number of diverse faculty at Illinois schools.
- King-Chavez Parks Future Faculty Program
This program offers financial assistance to students pursuing master's degrees or doctorate degrees at Michigan institutes of higher education.
- Executive Summary from the Keeping our Faculties Symposium
On October 18-20, 1998, over 300 faculty, administrators, and students from 36 states participated in a national symposium entitled "Keeping Our Faculties: Addressing the Recruitment and Retention of Faculty of Color in Higher Education" sponsored by the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. This meeting provided space for dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and policy makers aimed at generating useful strategies for increasing faculty diversity on college and university campuses. This executive summary distills information from the presentations of several symposium speakers with particular focus on their recommendations. A list of resources is also provided.
- The Impact of Social Interaction and Reward System Norms on Underrepresented Faculty by Annie Gubitosi-White
This case study examines the institution's cultural norms and how these norms affect underrepresented faculty. Study results identify social interaction and reward process norms and indicate that underrepresented faculty experience these norms differently than majority faculty. It also suggests that underrepresented faculty are often disadvantaged by these norms.
- Faculty Recruitment in Higher Education: Research Findings on Diversity and Affirmative Action by Debra Humphreys, AAC&U
This briefing paper debunks several myths about affirmative action and faculty hiring in higher education. It provides facts about the history of diversity in higher education, the actual numbers of women and minority faculty members in colleges and universities today, and how the recruitment process works.
- The Florida Education Fund (FEF)
FEF is a non-profit corporation with the goal of enhancing the educational advancement of historically underrepresented groups by offering programs and consulting services related to faculty and staff recruitment. Through their consulting work, FEF maintains and draws from a custom designed database of historically underrpresented faculty and adminstrators. This database stems directly from their McKnight Doctoral Fellowship (MDF) program and the Minority Particpation in Legal Education (MPLE) program.
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