Historically white, and male, colleges and universities in the U.S. began to diversify their undergraduate bodies in the 1960s and have made considerable progress since then.  But progress on faculty diversity has stalled.  That has wide-ranging implications for everything from university completion rates for students of color to the presence of new voices in medical research.  Universities deserve much of the blame, for they implemented programs to diversify the faculty that their own social scientists had long known to be ineffective.  An analysis of the efficacy of diversity programs at 600 schools over 20 years sheds light on how universities can build faculties that look more like their students, and the wider society, in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity.

About the speaker:

Frank Dobbin is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.  His Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton U. Press 2009) shows how HR managers and activists defined what it meant to discriminate in the eyes of the law, broadening the definition over time. His Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't with Alexandra Kalev (Harvard U. Press [Belknap] 2022) looks at the effectiveness of dozens of different diversity programs, in over 800 companies across more than 30 years, to answer the questions: Which programs help, which hurt, and how can harmful programs be improved?  Dobbin and Kalev are now investigating university programs designed to promote faculty diversity, using similar methods to sort out which are most effective.  

Departmental Seminar - Do Faculty Diversity Programs Work? Evidence from 600 U.S. Universities Across 20 Years

Date: 10 February 2025

Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm

Venue: CJT-9.29

Speaker: Prof. Frank Dobbin

Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=98266