The Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was charged by the Provost to investigate the status of underrepresented minority faculty (which includes Black, Hispanic, and Native American faculty) at MIT, and to use the findings from this investigation to inform a set of recommendations and best practices. The recommendations addressed Institute policy and practices to be implemented to increase the recruitment and the retention of underrepresented minority faculty at the Institute, and to create an environment conducive to the advancement of faculty careers across the broad spectrum of race, gender and nationality. The efforts of the Initiative include in-depth research on the experiences of minority faculty on campus, including survey and quantitative personnel data, a cohort analysis, and in-depth interviews of minority faculty at MIT. Specific issues addressed in the recommendations include faculty recruiting, mentoring, promotion and tenure, as well as structural recommendations that address support and accountability for diversity efforts ranging from the improvement of the graduate student and postdoctoral pipeline to the setting of strategic goals for increasing the numbers of minority faculty at the Institute. In the interest of learning from past and ongoing efforts, several interesting models of success within MIT's own departments and schools and at other institutions were examined, as well as patterns in hiring and in faculty experiences that spoke to a need for change on the departmental to institutional levels. An interesting aspect of the recommendations is that many of them seek to strengthen the MIT faculty environment for all faculty members by providing a stronger, more defined mentoring policy and clarity around promotion processes that benefit all junior faculty, broader and more extensive search processes that can expand on MITs breadth and depth, and greater engagement in the academic pipeline and the opportunity to guide young scholars toward academia. Current progress at MIT since the publication of the report in 2010 also will be touched on, as well as some perspective on the local efforts in Chemical Engineering at MIT and on other campuses.

Addressing faculty race and diversity in academic research institutions: Reflections on the MIT study

248th National Meeting (2014)

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