Ithaca College in New York has established new guidelines aimed at increasing the diversity of its faculty and staff. The new guidelines will include training for search committee chairs on tactics to make their searches more inclusive. In addition, a faculty member from outside the department conducting the search will be included on each search committee and a stipulation that candidates from minority groups be included in semi-finalist and finalist pools for available positions.
Gustavo Licon, an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at the university told the student newspaper on campus that “we’re not providing the best service to the students. We’re not exposing them to the wide variety of ideas and peoples that they will be exposed to in the workforce.”
Dr. Licon added that the college makes “a big emphasis of the diversity, and I think that students expect that, and when they don’t find it, there could be some level of disappointment.”
Ithaca College enrolls about 6,100 undergraduates and 450 graduate students. Blacks are 5 percent of the undergraduate student body. The percentage of the total faculty from minority groups is 10.6 percent, up from 7.7 percent in 2005.
