This is the third in a several part series discussing ways to improve diversity in philosophy departments. The other pieces can be found here.
My focus here is hiring tenure line faculty into philosophy departments. I pay particular attention to the proportion of women in philosophy departments and the impact various hiring practices may have on this proportion. Others contributing to this APA Blog series on Diversity are tackling different issues and I encourage you to read all of the contributions to the series. I am writing at a time of great upheaval in all of our lives. The current pandemic is impacting our personal and professional lives in profound ways. Some of us will be faced with losing our jobs or reductions in salary and for many of us the prospect of going back to hiring again may seem a distant one. I am sharing some reflections on and recommendations about hiring practices here for those of use fortunate enough to hire next academic year or in years to come. I am a former department chair at the Philosophy Department at the University of Utah. Our department has been consistently ranked close to the top or at the top for percentage of women in tenured or tenure line positions for the last ten years or so with 50% women of our faculty being women. This makes us an unusual department as the relevant background percentage in the USA is around 26% (Data on numbers of women philosophy faculty can be found via the following links: http://women-in-philosophy.org/, 2018 APA Membership Data, and Schwitzgebel and Jennings 2017). We are a very harmonious group, are proud of our department and we believe that specific things we do in recruitment, hiring and retention have shaped our department. Here I will outline some of our hiring and retention practices. First, I will fill in a few more details about the current makeup of our department.
Currently (including our faculty starting July 1st 2020) we have 20 tenure line faculty in Philosophy at the University of Utah, ten of whom are women. Our breakdown by rank is 7 Professors (4 women), 9 Associate Professors (3 women) and 4 Assistant Professors (3 women). Two of our current Assistant Professors are waiting for their final approval of their tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at the time of writing. In the last ten years we have hired 10 philosophers: Jonah Schupbach, Dustin Stokes, Jacob Stegenga, Melinda Fagan, Anne Peterson, Erin Beeghly, Carlos Santana, Natalia Washington, Joyce Havstad and Thi Nguyen. Three were hired as Associate Professors with tenure and the remainder were hired as Assistant Professors. One of this group left to take a job at another institution.
Kate Manne (Down Girl, Oxford, 2017) has recently brought to our attention the social structures that support the patriarchy in society at large but this point can be brought home: the social structure of professional philosophy today is also held together by norms that support patriarchy. We award “women friendly” departments (some such awards have been based on percentages of women in a department but see also the Society for Women in Philosophy UK’s Women Friendly Department Awards) but many in our profession have no inclination to work towards the goal of women only departments or departments that are built upon feminist values. Many among us find it mysterious that so few women are hired or retained in our departments. This is simply short sighted and betrays the dominance of a set of assumptions about past practices being the best practices. A moments critical reflection on these practices reveals a host of reasons why women are not hired to tenure track positions. Take for example the practice of eliminating a candidate from consideration for your job, not on the basis of having read her file, but rather following the recommendation of a colleague of yours who told you she did really poorly in his seminar in her first year in graduate school. Or consider the now abandoned practice of interviewing job candidates in hotel rooms at the Eastern APA. You would have thought that it would be easy to convince people to stop this practice by pointing to the extreme duress it put candidates under but many gave up the practice not out of respect for the welfare (and safety) of interviewees but rather after being convinced of the merits of the interview fallacy or being told that the practice was no longer condoned by the APA. Others are puzzled by the fact that women faculty leave their departments, often upon failure to be granted tenure. Again, this is short sighted. In many places there is no mentoring of junior faculty, men or women; there are few, if any senior women faculty members; and the tenure process is opaque and mysterious from the candidate’s point of view. In many areas of our profession hiring and retention look more like hazing than processes of recruitment and subsequent professional mentoring.
We have adopted some alternate practices in recruitment, hiring and retention at the University of Utah and we recommend them to places hoping to diversify their faculty.
- Our hiring process begins with initial recruitment. When we advertise a position we also go out and actively encourage people to apply. Given that we can only hire from our pool of applicants, we put a big effort into building that pool. Many applicants, especially younger folks, either in or just out of Ph.D. programs, worry about where they should apply and whether they are a fit or a match. Being explicitly asked to apply to a position is reassuring.
- Selection of finalists from a pool of candidates is a lot of work however you carry out the process. We assign a small group of faculty of varying ranks to read files and when we think a candidate shows promise, we may ask them to supplement their file with additional material. A candidate may include a writing sample in all their job applications and yet have another writing sample on hand that is much more apt for our current job description. We ask them if they are prepared to submit that work.
- Once we have a list of candidates we wish to fly out, we begin the recruitment process in earnest. Each finalist is assigned a faculty member to oversee their visit. That person works with the candidate so that they get the most out of their campus visit. Candidates give a talk, meet Deans and faculty of course, but we aim to make campus visits memorable and inviting, because we want one of these folks to join us as faculty members.
- Once they are hired, each new faculty member is assigned a mentor. That person’s job is to answer any questions the new faculty member might have about any aspect of professional life. Faculty mentors and the department chair talk frequently with junior faculty about their progress towards tenure and promotion and make the department and university expectations in this regard clear.
This process works best with supportive Deans and Diversity Office, Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) personnel and upper administration. Actively engaging such folks in the process and relying on your Diversity Office or OEO for advice and support can help tremendously. Unfortunately, as chair and former chairs reading this know well, administrators are not always fully supportive of our departmental efforts. When we faced this situation at Utah, we found that unifying as a department around our practices helped. However, unsupportive Deans or other administrators have derailed hiring of several of our fantastic candidates over the years.
We have no empirical evidence that our practices have resulted in the current make-up of our faculty. However, longstanding members of the department report that our department has benefited from instituting our hiring and mentoring practices. Also, both our newer colleagues, and candidates who were not ultimately hired, report that their campus visits with us stood out as pleasant experiences in their job search. Should we hire in the future, we plan to institute these practices or a version of them improved by input from our recently hired colleagues.
As I noted at the outset, I present this message at a time when hiring new colleagues may be one of the last things on our minds. However, should you be faced with the prospect of hiring in the near future and also are concerned about the lack of diversity in your department, or in the profession as a whole, try adopting some of the approaches to recruitment, hiring and retention I have outlined here. This will help us avoid the potentially lean times ahead magnifying our existing biases and further undermining opportunities for women in philosophy.
(A big thank you to Nathan Eckstrand, Melinda Fagan, Pat Hanna and Cynthia Levinthal for helpful comments on an earlier draft.)
Stephen M. Downes
Stephen M. Downes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, USA, where he served as department chair from 2009 to 2015. He has published articles on the philosophy of biology, the biology of human behavior, and scientific models. He is author of Models and Modeling in the Sciences: A philosophical introduction and co-editor (with Edouard Machery) of Arguing about Human Nature.
