Retaining Faculty of Color
(from the August 1996 AALS Newsletter)
This article is the third in a series of three about recruiting and retaining an ethnically diverse faculty. In the first article, the Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers presented an article on racial integration in legal education. In the second article, the Committee recommended techniques for successfully recruiting a diverse faculty. In this article, the Committee discusses techniques for retaining a diverse faculty.
This is a good news/bad news story. The good news is that the number of new minority law professors increased during the 1995-96 academic year, as it did during the previous year. The bad news, however, is that the number of minority faculty leaving law teaching also increased. Although 62 members of racial minorities became law professors during the 1995-96 academic year, 31 minority professors left. During the 1994-95 academic year, 46 members of racial minorities became law professors, but 22 minority professors left. The numbers are similar for the preceding years and clearly indicate that recruiting faculty of color is not enough. Although active recruitment efforts are critical to achieving faculty diversity, retention also is essential.
This article describes the factors that minority law professors and commentators have identified as major obstacles to retention. In focusing on racial integration of law school faculties, the Committee is limited by its charge, but it recognizes the need to diversify faculties in other ways. The Committee believes that the lessons to be learned from retention of faculty of color can be transferred to other retention needs as well.
Critical Mass
Perhaps the most important way to retain minority professors is to create a genuinely diverse faculty. Without a critical mass of minority colleagues, minority professors often feel isolated and alienated, and are more likely to leave. Therefore, if your recruiting stops with one minority professor or with just a few, you may continuously repeat a cycle of hiring a person, then losing that person, hiring a person, then losing that person.
The other retention problem created by too few minority faculty members is their popularity with law school, university, and community committees, boards, and other service groups. Although these groups' efforts to achieve diverse representation is commendable, they necessarily repeatedly call on the same minority faculty members because the pool is so small. Minority professors also often become official or unofficial advisers for the school's minority students and organizations. Many minority faculty are reluctant to decline because they have a strong commitment to help achieve diversity, provide community service, and assist minority students deal with an environment that may be hostile and isolating. The resulting overload and stress, however, have caused minority professors to leave the professoriate. Deans must actively protect minority professors from excessive service demands, particularly because such activities often are granted little weight in performance reviews.
Mentoring
The importance of mentoring has long been recognized, but minority professors often have fewer mentoring opportunities than their non-minority counterparts. Many faculties do not have senior minority faculty members, and many minority professors feel that they have few opportunities to work with their non-minority colleagues. The absence of mentoring opportunities for minority professors is particularly detrimental because they often have the greatest need for guidance and support; many minority faculty members confront special obstacles, ranging from racism among their students to feelings of isolation. Therefore, law schools should take an active role in establishing mentor relationships.
The choice of a mentor requires balancing several factors. Ideally, the mentor should be familiar with the junior faculty member's areas of teaching and scholarship. The mentor also must be knowledgeable about the three "p"s of the law school-policies, procedures, and politics. Additionally, the mentor must be willing and able to communicate candidly and completely with the junior faculty member. Obviously, the mentor must be committed to helping his or her junior colleague succeed.
Even a long-distance mentor can be effective. Indeed, faculty members may feel more comfortable expressing reservations and doubts, asking questions that they fear will betray ignorance about their teaching or scholarship, and asking pointed questions of a professor from another law school. By looking for a mentor at another school, a professor also is more likely to find a mentor who also is a professor of color, if that is desired. For these reasons, the AALS Section on Minority Groups created a mentoring program that links minority professors who want a mentor for research, scholarship, or possible administrative positions with experienced professors and administrators of color at other law schools. If you are interested in being a mentor or in being linked with a mentor at another school, contact Professor Lisa Chiyemi Ikemoto at Loyola Law School (phone 213-736-1164; fax 213-380-3769; e-mail likemoto@lmulaw.lmu.edu).
Clearly Stated Standards and Procedures
A minority professor's performance must be evaluated objectively and pursuant to the same standards and procedures as are applied to every other faculty member. To achieve this equality of treatment and to ensure that new faculty understand their responsibilities, a school must develop clearly stated standards and procedures, rather than relying on informal and ambiguous criteria. The standards and procedures should be published and should be given to each faculty member. They should specify the relative weights accorded to teaching, scholarship, and service activities. To eliminate uncertainty about performance, each faculty member should be evaluated annually and should be informed in a candid and constructive manner of the results of the evaluation and of expectations for future performance.
Although the standards should be uniform, they should not exclude nontraditional forms of scholarship. One of the most important reasons for creating a diverse faculty is to provide a variety of perspectives that will enhance knowledge and understanding. Therefore, a faculty should take care not to undervalue the work of a minority professor simply because it explores nontraditional areas or uses nontraditional methods.
Schools also should avoid falling into the well-intentioned, but ultimately destructive, trap of granting special privileges to minority professors. In Retention of Minority Professors: Dealing with the Failure to Presume Competence, 10 St. Louis U. Pub. L. Rev. 361 (1991), Dean Albert T. Quick and then Associate Dean Kent D. Lollis make a strong case that granting special privileges, such as leaves and reduced teaching loads that are unavailable to other faculty members, are counterproductive because they can reinforce stereotypical notions of incompetence, can undermine faculty respect, and can cause faculty resentment. Instead, such privileges should be granted only in accordance with published rules and standards that apply to all faculty members.
Another purpose for having clearly stated standards is to provide a check against the presumption of incompetence that often is applied to minority professors, in contrast to the presumption of competence that is accorded to other professors. Faculty and students often are hypercritical in evaluating a minority professor's performance and magnify any mistake. Non-minority colleagues often do not recognize the hostility and questioning of ability that colleagues and students can direct at a minority professor. The failure to acknowledge these factors can cause some faculty members and administrators to give undue weight to complaints and to respond inappropriately, such as by offering "enrichment lectures" to make up for the alleged inadequacies in the minority professor's performance. A school can respond in a less demeaning fashion by adhering to published standards and procedures in dealing with complaints and in otherwise evaluating a professor's performance.
By investing time and care in minority law professors, in addition to recruiting new professors, the faculty diversification process will proceed more quickly and humanely. If you other ideas on retaining faculty members of color, please send them to the Committee in care of the AALS so that we may share them.