Institutional Barriers to the Diversification of Academic Workforce

Abstract

Uncertainty about performance and financial stability can change organizational priorities in resource allocation and reinforce evaluation schemes that give advantage to certain demographic groups over the others. In this dissertation, I consider three conditions under which uncertainties about organizational performance and stability can be augmented, and show that under each condition, there is an adverse change in faculty diversity. First, organizational decline has reduced the diversity of new faculty via the reallocation of new faculty positions across academic disciplines and less diverse hiring at departmental subunits. Second, organizational resource dependence on research grants and student tuitions has driven the uneven and separated diversification of academic faculties. And third, the Great Recession reduced the number of faculty hires and the overall diversity of new faculty. In the first two empirical chapters, I develop and test new theories about how organizational decline and resource dependence adversely affect workforce diversification. In the third empirical chapter, I show that the Great Recession did not only amplify biases and prejudice against women and people of color, as prior research shows, but led to an actual workforce de-diversification. Altogether, this dissertation provides evidence that higher education institutions’ keen adherence to research performance and financial stability have stalled the diversification of the academic workforce.