by Lee Shainen

HAVE YOU EVER participated in a hiring process that was disbanded for lack of a diverse candidate pool? I have. It is enormously frustrating for everyone involved. The bad taste of this experience led me to volunteer to serve on an ad-hoc committee appointed to review hiring procedures at my college. However, it turned out that the committee's primary goal was to recommend ways to increase faculty diversity. I managed to keep my cool and stayed with it until completion. It was, as they say, educational.

After many months, I was pleased to see the committee's definition of diversity expand to include race, ethnicity, culture, age, special challenges, and socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds. A broad definition of diversity is an essential safeguard to keep any one group from being targeted for hire over another. A limited definition based primarily on appearance (besides being embarrassingly superficial) can actually have the long-term effect of making college faculties less diverse intellectually. It's not hard to imagine, in such a paranoid hiring climate, the favorite candidates being the ones who look the most different from but think the most like the current faculty and administrators.

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