In this workshop, Dr. Román Liera and Dr. Damani White-Lewis will present research on the role of typical faculty hiring criteria and practices that cement racial and ethnic inequalities in the professoriate. They will show our faculty, chairs, and search committees how common perceptions of “fit” and whiteness inhibit processes, policies, and norms that centralize racial equity. Attendees – who will have time to network with peers from other Ivy+ institutions – will be equipped with strategies to assess the hiring process in different stages to improve racial equity and decision-making.
Román Liera, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Higher Education at Montclair State University, is a widely published scholar investigating how college and university practices and policies perpetuate racial inequity and how faculty and administrators can transform such practices and policies to advance racial equity. His current projects focus on understanding how race operates in doctoral education socialization, the academic job market, hiring, and tenure and promotion. His research appears in the Journal of Higher Education, American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, among other venues, with titles such as “Color-evasive Racism in the Final Stage of Faculty Searches: Examining Search Committee Hiring Practices that Jeopardize Racial Equity Policy” and “Moving Beyond a Culture of Niceness in Faculty Hiring to Advance Racial Equity.”
Damani White-Lewis, Ph.D., is an award-winning Postdoctoral Scholar in the College of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. In Fall 2022, he will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Dr. White-Lewis studies racial inequality in academic careers using theories and methods from organizational behavior and social psychology. His current projects include NSF-funded survey experiments that manipulate decision-making contexts in faculty hiring and promotion and tenure scenarios, analyzing large-scale datasets on faculty career mobility and departure, and ethnographic observations of faculty hiring processes. His research appears in the Journal of Higher Education, Teachers College Record, CBE-Life Sciences Education, among others, with titles such as “In Pursuit of Meaningful Relationships: How Black Males Perceive Faculty Interactions in STEM” and “The Facade of Fit in Faculty Search Processes.”
