Denison University
PA-7: Support for Future Faculty Diversity

Denison participates in the Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) and hires one doctoral candidate or post-doc each year. The CFD is committed to increasing the diversity of students, faculty and curricular offerings at liberal arts colleges. The Consortium was founded as an association of liberal arts colleges committed to strengthening the ethnic diversity of students and faculty at liberal arts colleges. The early goals of the Consortium included encouraging U.S. citizens who are members of under-represented minority groups to complete their graduate programs and consider faculty employment in liberal arts colleges. The Consortium now invites applications for dissertation fellowships and post-doctoral fellowships from those who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents and who will contribute to increasing the diversity of member colleges by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximizing the educational benefits of diversity and/or increasing the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of students.

In addition to the CFD, the Associate Provost for Diversity and Intercultural Education provides oversight of all tenure-track faculty searches. This includes:

• Help crafting job descriptions to attract a diverse applicant pool
• Working with search committees to help prevent bias in the review of applications
• Working to ensure that the interview list is as diverse as possible.

The Associate Provost also:
• works to increase awareness of the ways in which a faculty person’s identity impacts a student’s course evaluation.
• Monitors faculty mentoring to ensure equity in the mentoring process
• Works to ensure that all faculty are retained.

Denison participates in the Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) and hosts CFD scholars each year. (In 2009-10 there was one scholar on campus and there was one scholar for the 2010-2011 school year as well.) This program provides teaching experience and mentoring for post docs and for graduate students nearing the end of their degree who are from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in liberal arts college faculty.

Denison also participates in the Preparing Future Faculty program with Ohio State University. Seven faculty members mentor post docs and senior grad students from Ohio State each year. This program is open to individuals from all backgrounds.

The Gilpatrick Center encourages and helps students apply for different scholarships to encourage students from under-represented groups to pursue graduate degrees. These scholarships include McNair scholarships, SROP scholarships, and Ford Diversity scholarships.

Denison maintains an internal password protected website where most of this information resides. Public access web pages have limited information on this topic.