For all of our difficulties in achieving student diversity on our nation’s college campuses, it is commonly acknowledged that faculty diversity is an even more elusive goal. Underrepresented minority faculty in 2005 composed only 16.5 percent of all full-time faculty in degree-granting institutions.

Explanations for the lack of progress in diversifying the professoriate usually center on some version of the “shallow pool” or “narrow pipeline” argument, which holds that there is simply an insufficient supply of qualified minority candidates, particularly in key academic areas like the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The faculty search process is also recognized as part of the problem, as incumbent faculty routinely hire others like themselves and thereby reproduce historic patterns of homogeneity.

To improve the identification and recruitment of minority faculty, several strategies have been adopted by search committees in recent times, including greater use of personal networks, placing position announcements in nontraditional academic media, coding job descriptions in ways that appeal directly to underrepresented faculty candidates and engaging in “target of opportunity” hiring; that is, hiring a person felt to be in the strategic interests of the unit, particularly when a national search would impede the hiring process. Perhaps these practices will produce substantive change over time. In the meantime, however, we are neglecting a potentially powerful source of support for our efforts — trusted external allies who share our values.   

The enlistment of non academics may seem anathema to a culture where the faculty clearly maintains exclusive control over hiring (as it properly should). But influential supporters have figured prominently in our diversity-related ambitions before, most recently in the U.S. Supreme Court cases of 2003, when legions of groups filed amicus briefs to protect the use of race as a factor in student admissions. Once student diversity was framed as a societal interest, as having measurable benefit beyond the self-interest of minorities or of the institutions wishing to recruit them, a remarkable cross-section of individuals and organizations signed on to advocate for race-conscious admissions. More importantly, it allowed a very broad swath of society to take shared responsibility for student diversity.