Damani White-Lewis on faculty diversity amid uncertainty

Universities across the country are grappling with how to continue efforts to diversify their faculty under mounting legal and political pressure to back away from diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. A recent Inside Higher Ed article explored the escalating uncertainty surrounding faculty hiring policies, featuring insights from Damani White-Lewis.

White-Lewis, an assistant professor in Penn GSE’s Policy, Organizations, Leadership, and Systems Division who studies racial inequality in academic careers, highlighted the widespread confusion across institutions about what is now considered legally permissible in faculty hiring. “There’s genuinely no consensus,” he said, noting that legal interpretations of the new restrictions vary widely across campuses. “I wanted to do a project of: If you asked, like, 10 different legal counsels, what sorts of answers would they come to and how did they make sense of them?”

White-Lewis offered practical ways institutions might continue advancing faculty diversity while minimizing legal risks. Among them, investment in postdoctoral positions is “a very perceivably neutral avenue” to expand opportunities for diverse scholars, especially in STEM fields, giving “everybody more opportunities to research, write and publish and become more competitive for faculty jobs.” He also emphasized the importance of evaluating candidates’ mentoring experience with marginalized populations, not just their research and teaching, during faculty searches. “What I’m suggesting is to make the evaluation of mentoring capabilities noteworthy instead of it being subsidiary.”

As institutions proceed with caution, White-Lewis’s insights offer a grounded perspective on what’s still possible, and still essential, in the push for a more representative professoriate.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed.