The Department of Geography’s affirmative action plan for faculty hiring is guided by our mission and values statement adopted in 2014: “We seek to foster an inclusive and reflexive community by actively working against intentional and unintentional exclusionary practices. Our work on diversity and community encompasses intersecting dimensions of difference (such as gender, class, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation) and values how we do our work as much as what work we do.”
Sustained Faculty Recruitment
We approach building a diverse faculty as a sustained process of recruitment and retention that is ongoing, whether or not we are actively engaged in a search. On an ongoing basis, faculty identify and interact with promising doctoral students and early career faculty when they are at professional meetings and visiting other universities, with an eye toward recruiting diverse applicant pools in future searches. Geography faculty build and support curriculum and campus programs that center equity and diversity – creating networks of mutual support that help us identify and recruit future faculty candidates who will contribute to these efforts on campus. Equity and diversity are crucial priorities in our graduate student recruiting efforts, as a vital step in recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty. We are attentive to multiple axes of difference, and place particular emphasis on recruiting and retaining Under-Represented Minority applicants, because geography as a discipline lags behind other social sciences in numbers of URM graduate students and faculty. Through our research, teaching, and service, we build relationships with campus colleagues and programs that help ensure successful recruitment.
Further specific practices include:
- Our Colloquium speaker series prioritizes invitations to early career scholars whose research and presence diversify geography and expand our departmental relationships beyond existing networks.
- We use conference session organizing, invited speaker visits, and other professional activities to connect with potential future applicants and to signal the department’s intellectual identities as open and dynamic.
- When faculty organize workshops, summer institutes, and other activities that recruit and mentor junior scholars, we prioritize departmental co-sponsorship funds toward activities likely to involve scholars whose research and presence diversify geography.
Building Diverse Applicant Pools
Our faculty search processes rely heavily upon the College of Arts & Sciences affirmative action guidelines as well as University-level resources identified there. We circulate position advertisements to multiple venues, including those likely to reach high concentrations of under-represented minority applicants: American Association of Geographers’ Jobs in Geography clearinghouse; Chronicle of Higher Education, and interdisciplinary professional associations likely to reach diverse applicants appropriate to a particular position description (e.g. American Studies Association, Native American & Indigenous Studies Association). We also recruit applicants via research specialty groups within American Association of Geographers likely to reach diverse applicant groups (e.g. Black Geographies, Latinx Geographies, Indigenous Peoples, Queer & Trans Geographies, and others). For each search, all faculty are invited to help generate a list of priority departments and individuals to whom we reach out directly to invite applications from scholars whose research and teaching is advancing equity and diversity in our discipline.
Search Committee Development
All members of search committees attend a workshop on implicit bias, developing assessment rubrics, best practices for reviewing files and creating the short list, effective committee deliberations, and handling conflicts of interests. Search committee evaluation criteria explicitly address applicants’ required equity and diversity statement and potential to advance equity and diversity goals for the university, college and department.
File Review
Search committee chairs, in consultation with the department chair, evaluate the success of our efforts to recruit a diverse pool before beginning any review or deliberation of files. For instance, we assess the percentage of under-represented minority and female
applicants in our pool as compared to recent figures from national sources in our discipline (National Science Foundation or American Association of Geographers), with a commitment to continuing outreach that diversifies our applicant pool.
Campus Visits
When candidates from under-represented groups visit for campus interviews, we arrange for them to meet with faculty members who identify in similar ways, such as one-on-one appointments or small group conversations during the visit. All candidates receive a
‘candidate resources’ information sheet linking them to department, college, and university DEI resources for faculty and students (starts with UW Faculty Advancement templates and then is tailored to the thematic focus of each search we conduct). This resource document contains information about UW race and equity activities, links to work-life resources around child and elder care, housing, retirement and health benefits, and more. We invite all candidates to tell us if they would like to meet with these (or other) programs during their visit.
Retention
Building a diverse faculty includes supporting the thriving and retention of faculty long after successful recruitment. As a faculty, we devote our time, resources and connections to supporting colleagues throughout their careers, but especially in the early stages. We seek to:
- Actively connect junior colleagues with campus allies, share information about work-life and community resources,
- Communicate policies and expectations clearly,
- Prioritize departmental resources in support of junior faculty development opportunities, and
- Listen and respond to junior colleagues’ concerns and suggestions about what would most help them thrive.
We regularly review and discuss our departmental promotion, merit, and retention policies, revising as needed, so that these vital documents for faculty life are in the foreground of our collective departmental knowledge.