Systemic biases still plague profs

Two new studies cast a disturbing light on the systemic biases that determine the makeup of academic faculty at universities nationwide.

The first study, which examined 1,500 biomedical doctoral graduates, revealed that minorities and women are disproportionately likely to avoid careers in academia and research.

The research subjects provided various reasons why they chose not to pursue academic careers, including a rigorous tenure procedure in which examining committees may hold different values from applicants.

A second study, published in “Science Advances,” demonstrated how exclusive the academy has become. Most notably, 71 to 86 percent of tenure-track faculty members in business, history and computer science come from just 25 percent of the nation’s universities.

The study found that the academic hiring process often relies more on prestigious schools than objective merit to determine a candidate’s value. In the field of history, the top 10 schools produced more than three times as many tenure-track professors as the schools ranked Nos. 11 through 20.

The study also showed that when female graduates were hired for professorships, they were more likely to work at a less-prestigious school than men who graduated from the same institutions.

Overall, these studies suggest that standard diversity measures — such as increasing the number of women or minorities in STEM fields — are inadequate to diversify the academy. We recommend that in order to meaningfully reshape the academic landscape, university hiring committees will need to focus on hiring according to merit and potential instead of falling into the meaningless trap of name-brand elitism.