The Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a report last week underlining the need to improve the recruitment and retention of black, Hispanic and Native American professors to the institution’s faculty. The report, led by chemical engineering professor Paula Hammond, noted that while these underrepresented minorities, referred to as URM throughout the report, made up a total of 30 percent of the U.S. population. At MIT they represent only six percent of the faculty. MIT President Susan Hockfield released a letter to the school community about the report. ‘Creating a culture of inclusion is not an optional exercise; it is the indispensable precondition that enables us to capitalize on our diverse skills, perspectives and experiences, so that we can better advance the fundamental research and education mission of MIT,’ Hockfield said. The report found that the school recruits mainly from its own institution and other elite schools, which led it to suggest that widening MIT’s pool of applicants could lead to an increase in skilled URM faculty. ‘MIT needs to increase the pool from which it hires faculty members, especially underrepresented minorities,’ said Enectal’iacute; Figueroa-Feliciano, a Puerto Rican physics professor at MIT.
‘I think that’s an effort that has potential to yield a much larger pool of excellent candidates,’ he said.
The report also found discontent among URM faculty while employed at MIT. Higher numbers of people from this group have the tendency to leave early in their careers, have negative faculty mentoring experiences and be generally dissatisfied at the institution. As a partial solution, the report calls for set public goals for recruitment at each of MIT’s schools every year. It also calls for the institution to hire in clusters when possible, to create recruitment programs at campuses with a stronger URM presence and to encourage undergraduate URM students to pursue graduate school. Further goals have been made to strengthen MIT’s recruitment, retention, promotion and climate for URM. ‘I think that it is a very good step for the university to put its resources in making such a study,’ said Figueroa-Feliciano. ‘I think it’s also very positive that they have made the report public ‘- it’s a fairly frank assessment, not sugarcoated, as to what the situation is.’ ‘As long as the numbers [of underrepresented minorities] are improving, it’s not a major problem,’ said Obioma Ohia, a member and webmaster for the MIT Black Graduate Student Association. ‘It’s not isolated at MIT ‘- this happens basically in all of academia.’ The report was born out of a 2004 resolution by the faculty of MIT to double the percentage of URM at MIT within ten years. In 2007, Hockfield appointed a team of faculty from all of MIT’s schools to undertake a study of the institution’s faculty diversity. The study took more than two years before it was ready for publication. MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif and the committee behind the report will be meeting with each of the institution’s schools to begin implementing its guidelines, according to an MIT press release. Last year, Boston University released a similar study that found that URM only represented four percent of its faculty. The school has since been implementing the recommendations of the report.
‘That report is out there, and it was a thorough and in-depth study, something President Robert Brown and Provost David Campbell and faculty endorse and support as an important initiative,’ BU spokesman Colin Riley said.’