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Gasman: Elite research institutions don’t have diverse faculties because ‘we don't want them’
September 27, 2016
UPDATED: Marybeth Gasman writes about the reactions she received from people who read her essay from The Washington Post regarding why universities don't hire faculty of color.
Dr. Marybeth Gasman
At a forum this summer, Marybeth Gasman was asked why the faculty at elite research institutions were overwhelmingly white.
“The reason we don’t have more faculty of color among college faculty is that we don’t want them,” responded Gasman, Director of Penn GSE’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions. “We simply don’t want them.”
“Having a diverse faculty — in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion — adds greatly to the experiences of students in the classroom,” Gasman writes. “It challenges them — given that they are likely not to have had diversity in their K-12 classroom teachers — to think differently about who produces knowledge. It also challenges them to move away from a ‘white-centered’ approach to one that is inclusive of many different voices and perspectives.”
If colleges are really serious about diversifying their faculty positions, Gasman challenges them to rethink longstanding hiring practices, and ask why those practices came into being in the first place.