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All The Fit That?s News To Print...

Cathy Trower is research director and Anne Gallagher is assistant director of Harvard University's Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (Coache). In the Chronicle of Higher Education they report (Feb. 4) the findings of a Coache study ?on what assistant professors want and need to be successful in academe.? The study found, among other things, that ?an institutional commitment to diversity is integral to creating a welcoming and supportive culture for new faculty members.?

No surprise there; finding that ?diversity? is important on campuses today is rather like discovering, well, that there are few Republicans in humanities and social science departments. But I did find this rather interesting:

At Coache, we measured a number of variables to assess the workplace satisfaction of early-career academics. One of the factors most highly correlated with success was the issue of institutional ?fit.? The survey data suggest that your chances of earning tenure and your decision to stay at an institution are affected by the opportunities you have as an assistant professor to collaborate and interact with senior mentors....

Our findings show that minority faculty members expressed less satisfaction with nearly all of the climate variables we measured ? including the issue of fit ? as compared with their white peers....

If ?fit? is as important to success in academe as everyone seems to agree it is, and black junior faculty think they ?fit? less well than their white peers and hence are more dissatisfied with their institutions, would a search committee seeking to hire a new assistant professor be justified in suspecting that a black candidate would probably ?fit? with its institution less well than a non-black candidate and hence would be less likely to succeed?

Just asking.

Full post as published by Discriminations on February 05, 2009 (boomark / email).