Demand 10: Faculty Recruitment and Retention

via community letter, Nov. 11, 2015: RESOLVED Fall, 2018

"Currently, Emory 6.8% of faculty at Emory are black. Most faculty of color are comprised of African American studies professors and lecturer/adjunct professors. The African American studies department has been a great resource to Black students, however, they too can be overextended with their various appointments in other departments. Other faculty of color are adjunct professors/lecturers, who do not have job security and are not valued in their positions in their departments. Thus, we need black professors in all disciplines, traditional and nontraditional. We demand that there be an increase in the amount of black and Latino full time, tenure-track professors to 10% by the year 2017 in other departments/disciplines besides the African American Studies department. We also demand that better records are kept of faculty and staff of color demographics and are easily accessible by the student body. These statistics of professors' ethnicity are important for increasing accountability. We also demand that Black professors when in non-traditional or traditional disciplines must not be abused by the overwhelmingly white academy. Professors, too, need protection for the violent, racist and sexist incidents that they endure from their white colleagues in their departments."

  • The Office of the Provost now requires Emory colleges and schools to submit faculty hiring plans and consult with school leadership on opportunities for those hiring plans to be strategic and intentional in faculty recruitment and hiring processes. 
  • Faculty search committees are required to complete implicit bias training. 
  • Emory hired a chief diversity officer and vice provost for diversity and inclusion and created the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with responsibilities including faculty diversity and retention efforts. 
  • In 2016, Emory conducted a salary equity study to ensure that women faculty and those from historically underrepresented and underserved groups were compensated equitably. 
  • With the One Emory strategic framework established in 2018, the university committed $75 million to a fund to hire faculty from historically underrepresented and underserved groups. These funds may also be used to enable deans to make competitive retention offers. 
  • In 2018, the Office of the Provost commenced a study to examine retention rates for faculty from historically underrepresented and underserved groups and found that these faculty are typically retained at commensurate or higher rates than faculty from other demographic categories. These data are now regularly monitored and updated. 
  • In 2018, the Office of the Provost became an institutional member of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (https://www.facultydiversity.org/), which provides many resources supporting faculty development, including mentoring, productivity, work-life balance, and faculty success. Since 2019, the Office of the Provost has sponsored faculty seeking to complete their Faculty Success Program, prioritizing faculty from historically underrepresented and underserved groups. 
  • In 2019, the Office of the Provost entered an agreement with the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (https://coache.gse.harvard.edu/) to formally study Emory’s academic workforce and measure faculty satisfaction and support on multiple dimensions, enabling the university to measure its performance against other peers. Emory is a full partner and participates in both the retention survey and the faculty satisfaction survey. 

Updated: July 2020