Searching for Excellence & Diversity®:
Workshops for Search Committees
Hiring and retaining an excellent and diverse faculty is a top priority for colleges and universities nationwide.
"The diversity of the university's faculty and staff inevitably influences its strength and intellectual personality."
"We need diversity in discipline, intellectual outlook, cognitive style, and personality to offer students the breadth of ideas that constitute a dynamic intellectual community."
"Diversity of experience, age, physical ability, religion, ethnicity, and gender contributes to the richness of the environment for teaching and research."
Despite expressed committments to hiring an excellent and diverse faculty, faculty members serving on hiring committees typically receive little education about the search process.
Consequently, WISELI has implemented a workshop, Searching for Excellence and Diversity®, that provides faculty with information, advice, and techniques that will help them run more effective and efficient search committees, diversify their applicant pools, their interviewed candidates, the offers they make, and ultimately the new faculty they hire.
Description of the workshops
Based on concepts of active learning and peer teaching, WISELI's workshop for search committees combines brief presentations with active discussions that encourage small groups of search committee chairs and members to learn from each other’s experiences and ideas. Topics discussed in these workshops include:
- Gaining the support and active involvement of search committee members
- Recruiting a highly qualified pool of candidates
- Discussing diversity within search committee meetings
- Raising awareness of unconscious assumptions and their potential influence on evaluation of candidates
- Ensuring a fair and thorough review of candidates
- Developing and implementing an effective interview process
- Successfully hiring selected candidates
WISELI uses the following publications in our workshops:
- Searching for Excellence and Diversity: A guide for search committee chairs (PDF). Hard copies of this guidebook are available from WISELI's Online Bookstore.
- Reviewing Applicants: Research on Bias and Assumptions (PDF). A brochure summarizing research on unintentional biases and asssumptions and their potential influence on evaluation of faculty candidates. Printed copies are available from WISELI's Online Bookstore.
Workshops for UW-Madison
WISELI offers the workshop, Searching for Excellence and Diversity®, to search committee chairs and members in several different venues and formats:
- Workshops designed for schools/colleges on the UW-Madison campus in cooperation with the school's/college's Dean, Equity and Diversity Committee, Human Resources Department or other unit. Please follow the links below to obtain descriptions of workshops offered in the following schools/colleges:
- College of Agricultural and Life Sciences -- Please register for WISELI's cross-college workshop series (PDF)
- College of Engineering -- Please register for WISELI's cross-college workshop series (PDF)
- College of Letters & Science (PDF)
- School of Medicine and Public Health — To be scheduled
- A cross-college workshop (PDF) for search committee members who cannot attend the workshop scheduled for their school/college or for faculty serving on search committees in any other UW-Madison school/college.
- Department workshops: Upon request, WISELI can present a department-wide workshop.
Please see our schedule for the Fall 2011 semester and please contact us for more information.
Resources
WISELI Resources
- Searching for Excellence and Diversity: A guide for search committee chairs (PDF). Hard copies of this guidebook are available from WISELI's Online Bookstore.
- Recruiting Resources for Search Committees.
- Reviewing Applicants: Research on Bias and Assumptions (PDF). A brochure summarizing research on unintentional biases and asssumptions and their potential influence on evaluation of faculty candidates. Printed copies are available from WISELI's Online Bookstore.
- Benefits and Challenges of Diversity (PDF). A booklet summarizing research on the benefits and challenges of diversity.
UW-Madison Resources
- UW-Madison Search Handbook: Faculty, Academic Staff, and Limited Appointments
- UW-Madison Hiring Website
Designed by the UW - Madison Office of Quality Improvement and Human Resource Development, this website provides guidelines, helpful suggestions, resources and is an good place to start looking for answers to any questions you may have. - UW-Madison Dual Career Assistance Program
- UW Provost's memo on Faculty Strategic Hiring Initiative
- UW Office of Equity and Diversity (OED) The UW Office of Equity and Diversity "promotes, integrates and transfers equity and diversity principles to nurture human resources and advance the mission of the University of Wisconsin-Madison." The OED relies on education and professional development to achieve its goals which include complying with Affirmative Action laws, Title IX stipulations, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Consequently, it provides valuable resources for search committees including providing recruiting resources, participating in WISELI's search workshops, consulting with search committees about the search process, helping search committees accomodate the needs of faculty candidates with disabilities.
- Living and Working in Madison
The UW-Madison employment website provides information about resources, organizations, and services on the UW-Madison campus and in the Madison community. Information about diversity on campus and in the community is included on this website; especially within the Spectrum Magazine and its searchable directory of organizations and businesses that serve diverse communities. This information is useful not only for prospective applicants, but also for search committee members who strive to actively recruit applicants.
Resources at Other Universities
- MIT: Faculty Search Committee Handbook (PDF)
- Penn State University: "Guidelines for Recruiting a Diverse Workforce"
- Rice University: National Database of Female Ph.D. and Postdoctoral Scholars in Science and Engineering — a searchable database of over 1300 female graduate students and postdoctoral scholars seeking faculty positions. (This database contains applications received from across the nation for the NSF-sponsored workshop on "Negotiating the Ideal Faculty Position" hosted by the ADVANCE Program. For questions about the workshop or database, please email advance1@rice.edu.)
- University of Michigan:
- STRIDE (Science and Technology Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence), Faculty Recruitment workshop Presentation (PDF)
- ADVANCE at U. Michigan, Faculty Recruitment Handbook (PDF)
- University of Washington: Faculty Recruitment Toolkit
Resources from various professional and academic organizations:
- The Minority & Women Doctoral Directory — This registry "maintains up-to-date information on employment candidates who have recently received, or are soon to receive, a Doctoral or Master's degree in their respective field from one of approximately two hundred major research universities in the United States. The current edition of the directory lists approximately 4,900 Black, Hispanic, American Indian, Asian American, and women students in nearly 80 fields in the sciences, engineering, the social sciences and the humanities." Employers can order the entire directory or only the section relevant to a specific discipline.
- Faculty for the Future — administered by WEPAN (Women in Engineering Programs and Advocates Network), this website focuses "on recruiting a highly diverse candidate pool of women, minorities, and other under-represented groups interested in academic careers and research positions." Faculty and administrators can post jobs and search for candidates. Students and recent graduates can post resumes and search for available positions.
- American Association of University Professors
- Recommended prodedures for increasing the number of minority persons and women on college and university faculty
- Diversity & Affirmative Action in Higher Education — This page lists documents describing the Association’s policies and ongoing work on these issues,and provides links to other pertinent information such as:
- How to Diversify Faculty — discusses current employment law and the best legal and practical strategies for diversifying the faculty.
- Sources on the educational benefits of diversity
- Association of American Colleges and Universities
- Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, Diversifying the Faculty: A Guide for Search Committees. Also available via ERIC (PDF)
- Daryl G. Smith, et al., Achieving Faculty Diversity: Debunking the Myths
- National Science Foundation(NSF) Resources
- NSF, Science and Engineering Doctorate Awards — a series of annual reports, beginning in 1994, based on results from the NSF's Survey of Earned Doctorates. Can be used to determine the number and percentage of women and minority Ph.D. recipients in each year. Other NSF Reports which may be of similar value to search committees include:
- WebCASPAR — a database that "provides easy access to a large body of statistical data resources for science and engineering (S&E) at U.S. academic institutions. WebCASPAR emphasizes S&E, but its data resources also provide information on non-S&E fields and higher education in general. This database can be queried to obtain information on the number and percentage of PhD recipients by race, gender, citizenship, field of study, and degree-granting institution. It is a useful tool for gaining knowledge about the demographics of potential applicant pools. Tutorials for using the database are provided.
Relevant Journal Articles:
- Daryl Smith, "How to Diversify the Faculty," Academe 86(Sept/Oct 2000): 48-52.
- Steinpreis, Rhea, Katie A. Anders, and Dawn Ritzke. "The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study." Sex Roles 41, no. 7 (10, 1999): 509-528.
- Trix, Frances, and Carolyn Psenka. "Exploring the Color of Glass: Letters of Recommendation for Female and Male Medical Faculty." Discourse & Society 14, no. 2 (2003): 191-220.
- For links to these and other articles referred to in our workshops and our brochure, Reviewing Applicants: Research on Bias and Assumptions, see WISELI Library: Bias Brochure and Search Workshop References (For help using our library database, follow this link)
- For an extensive bibliography relevant to the hiring process and education for search committees, see the WISELI Library: Bibliography for Search Committee Workshops(For help using our library database, follow this link)
Evaluation
- Sample – Search Workshop Evaluation Form
- Formative Evaluation of Search Workshops, 2006
- Sheridan, Jennifer; Eve Fine; Jessica Winchell; Christine Maidl Pribbenow; Molly Carnes; and Jo Handelsman. 2007. "Searching for Excellence & Diversity: Does Training Faculty Search Committees Improve Hiring of Women?" American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) 2007 Conference Proceedings. June 2007.
- Sheridan, Jennifer; Christine Maidl Pribbenow; Eve Fine; Jo Handelsman; and Molly Carnes. 2007. "Climate Change at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: What Changed, and Did ADVANCE Have an Impact?" Women in Engineering Programs & Advocates Network (WEPAN) 2007 Conference Proceedings. June 2007.
- Pribbenow, Christine Maidl; Jennifer Sheridan; Brenda Parker; Jessica Winchell; Deveny Benting; Kathy O’Connell; Cecilia Ford; Ramona Gunther; and Amy Stambach. July 2007. "Summative Evaluation Report of WISELI: The Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute." (See Chapter 4).
- Formative Evaluation of Search Workshops, 2009.