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In 1993 the
faculty responded to student and faculty concerns about the need for
greater diversity in the College’s curriculum, admissions,
and hiring, by passing a resolution that called for
increased ethnic diversity among the faculty that "would enable Pomona
College to pursue its educational mission more effectively.”
The faculty reaffirmed this resolution in 2004 and
rededicated itself to promoting excellence and diversity
through the College search process.
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| Introduction |
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In a world in which peoples and nations with sharply
different ideals and experiences are increasingly coming
into contact with one another, we believe that our
intellectual leaders must be as diverse as the students they
will be teaching and the larger society they represent. It
is striking that the southern California region in which
Pomona College is located is becoming one of the most
ethnically diverse regions in the United States, as the
United States continues to draw immigrants from all over the
world. At Pomona College our educational mission is to
foster leaders by developing their power to analyze
conditions and creatively imagine new ones. Our success
depends upon admitting a diverse student body and hiring a
diverse faculty since only through a “robust exchange of
ideas,” as Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote, generated out of a
variety of backgrounds and experiences and types of
knowledge, can we create an atmosphere that is "most
conducive to speculation, experiment and creation.” Central
to the education our students enjoy at our residential
college is the face-to-face interaction with faculty members
who, because they may come from different cultural,
economic, and racial backgrounds, might challenge their
unexamined notions of how the world operates. This is an
educational benefit that serves our entire academic
community and will help prepare all of our students to
develop informed, constructive, leadership roles in the
world.
The College seeks to promote faculty diversity and equal
opportunity by making every effort to provide a scholarly
and educational environment that is welcoming, challenging,
and supportive of all participants, regardless of race,
class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin,
religion, or political perspective. Although we do not
believe that race and gender are the only important
differences our faculty should embody -- indeed, there are
many kinds of differences that we feel are crucial to have
represented in our community even as these differences
change over time -- yet we continue to believe that race and
gender are of special importance, and we will continue to
make efforts to recruit from historically underrepresented
racial and ethnic groups that have experienced prejudice and
discrimination.
The College should employ a variety of strategies to recruit
and retain a diverse faculty. We recognize that not all
disciplines are the same and that each search has its own
possibilities, constraints, and applicant pool. Not all
approaches or strategies will work equally well in all
searches. Sensitivity to the problems in each discipline
requires a flexible conceptualization of diversity. But we
believe that we must also be intentional from the beginning
of every search about our commitment to finding as diverse
an applicant pool as possible and that our campus-wide goal
is to hire a diverse faculty body. Finally, the hiring
process cannot be the College’s only initiative in
attempting to diversify the faculty. Careful efforts to
mentor all faculty, including women of all backgrounds and
faculty of color, especially as junior faculty, by
department chairs, program coordinators, and by the Dean of
the College will be necessary to ensure their academic
success.
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| Recruiting
and Hiring |
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Composing the Search Committee
The Dean, Diversity Committee, and Diversity Officer will
meet together with all department chairs who have authorized
searches for the coming year to emphasize the College’s
diversity plan and to strategize ways in which the most
diverse candidate pool can be developed: these might include
identifying and contacting two or three distinguished
faculty in their field(s) to advise them in an ongoing way
about how to achieve an excellent diverse candidate pool;
or, if a department lacks such expertise on their own
faculty, they might consider asking a colleague from outside
the department or someone from the Diversity Committee to
help in outreach efforts.
The Diversity Officer will also meet with each search
committee to share annual figures of faculty and color and
women faculty members at the College and to discuss the
specific plans departments and programs have for creating a
diverse candidate pool.
Search committees should create plans that describe the
availability of women and faculty of color in the field, the
methods of recruitment and advertising, and the objective,
non-discriminatory criteria to be used in selecting
candidates.
Developing the Position Announcement and Advertising
Every effort should be made to ensure that the job
advertisement reflects the needs of the College and the
Department, and that it is drafted as broadly as possible to
attract the largest available pool of potential qualified
applicants. Job advertisements and a department’s strategy
to recruit a diverse pool of applicants must be approved by
the Dean and Diversity Officer.
In addition to the required notice that the College is an
equal opportunity employer, job announcements should contain
additional language reflecting the department’s interest in
attracting applicants whose teaching, research, or service
activities can contribute to the academic diversity of the
campus. For instance, a department can say: “The department
is particularly interested in candidates who have experience
working with students from diverse backgrounds and a
demonstrated commitment to improving access and success to
higher education for underrepresented students. Candidates
should describe previous activities mentoring women,
students of color, students with disabilities, or other
underrepresented groups.”
Searches should be broadly advertised beyond simply a
department’s main professional association. This should
include all available avenues for publicizing the position,
including national publications, personal contacts, list
serves, mailing lists, professional and academic
conferences, and web sites. As search committee members
write letters or make phone calls to their colleagues to ask
about promising candidates, they can specifically inquire
about promising women and candidates of color.
Funds will be available for those who wish to attend
conferences or meetings attended primarily by women and
minorities in the field.
Monitoring the Selection Process
The Office of Human Resources at Pomona College will collect
diversity data from candidates and tabulate results. The
Dean of the College and Diversity Officer will review the
applicant pool prior to campus visits in order to determine
if women and applicants of color are appropriately
represented in the pool at about the rate of their estimated
availability in the field. Departments will be expected to
review whether recruitment and outreach procedures were
sufficiently broad, and if not, the department will need to
consider reopening the search with expanded recruitment
efforts.
The Dean and the Diversity Officer will review the longer
short list to ensure that objective, non-discriminatory
selection criteria were properly and consistently applied in
the review of the candidates, and that those criteria were
consistent with the documented academic needs of the
department. If selection problems are identified, a search
committee can either reopen the search to conduct additional
outreach or revisit the pool of all qualified candidates and
create a new list according to appropriate selection
criteria. Search Committees should prepare a written report
that describes the reason(s) for both including and
rejecting candidates from the short list of those selected
for campus interviews. The Dean and the Diversity Officer
will review those documents and will examine committee
selections to ensure that they meet the selection criteria
listed in the position announcement.
Additional Hiring Procedures
In addition to the Search Committee process above, the
College has two additional hiring procedures in which the
College’s diversity interests can and should be recognized.
The Target of Opportunity hire, which is described in the
first instance in the Chair’s Handbook, and the Pomona
College Scholar for Academic Diversity are described below.
Pomona College Scholar for Academic Diversity
Pomona College will normally offer one appointment of a
Pomona College Scholar in Residence each year. The screening
of candidates should be based on excellence in scholarship,
teaching, and the possibility of service to the college and
community including the mentoring and advising of a diverse
student body. The College is particularly interested in
candidates whose scholarship emphasizes such issues as race,
social equity, and/or communities underserved by traditional
academic research, or have experience working with students
from diverse backgrounds and a demonstrated commitment to
improving access to higher education for underrepresented
students. All applications will be accepted and reviewed and
decisions will be made without regard to race, gender, or
ethnicity. The Scholar will teach one or two courses,
depending on whether they have the Ph.D. in hand. These
Scholars could very well be appointed in fields where a
tenure track hiring is anticipated. If departments or
programs feel a Scholar merits consideration as a Target of
Opportunity (TOP), they can bring him or her forward to the
Faculty Position Advisory Committee (FPAC) and Faculty
Personnel Committee (FPC), without a national search.
Target of Opportunity Hires
The Pomona College faculty have two ways of recommending new
and replacement tenure-track positions at the College. The
first and most common is to request authorization for a
national search open to all qualified applicants. A
department or program initiates this process by applying to
the Faculty Position Advisory Committee, whose procedures
and guidelines are found in this Handbook. An alternative
way to request authorization is through the uncommon vehicle
of a Target of Opportunity (TOP) hire. A TOP exists when we
find – either on our own campus or at another institution –
a person of such outstanding quality that an appointment
will bring the College distinction in the areas of teaching
and scholarship, and the possibility of service to the
college and community, including the mentoring and advising
of a diverse student body. The College sees the hiring of
this particular person as being in its strategic interest,
and it has come to the view that a national search would
impede this hire. A TOP is initiated by a department or
program. The proposal must go to the FPAC, which judges the
merits of adding the position, and then to the Faculty
Personnel Committee, which judges the merits of this
particular candidate for the position. These two
recommendations then go to the Dean and the President, who
choose whether or not to authorize the appointment, based in
part on available funding.
Monitoring and Reporting
The College’s Affirmative Action Committee will monitor the
numbers of women of all backgrounds and faculty of color
that the College employs in tenure-track and rolling
contracts and annually report these numbers to the faculty.
That Committee will periodically assess whether the College
has attained a level of diversity that would make special
efforts as outlined here no longer necessary or,
alternatively, ever more necessary in the years to come.
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