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This toolkit, developed by the President and Provost’s Leadership Council for Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice in 2020, is designed to serve as a resource for tenure-track search committees and administrators at Oregon State University.
The following tenets should be attended to throughout the search process.
Shared governance describes the sharing of responsibilities between faculty and administration in decisions related to the academic work of the university; “full-cycle” means that administrators “close the loop” with faculty at the conclusion of the decision-making process, as described in the OSU Faculty Senate Shared Governance Document (PDF). In searches, faculty (along with staff and students) and administration (usually via the hiring official) have well-defined roles and responsibilities. To ensure “full-cycle” governance, the hiring official and the search committee connect regularly to check for alignment. Differences of opinion are best resolved through in-person dialogue between the hiring official and the search committee. For more information about search roles, see Forming the Search Committee.
According to OSU’s strategic plan, equity, diversity, inclusion and social justice are among the important principles that underpin our mission and vision, guide our priorities and actions and are visible in our achievements. Each faculty search should advance these principles. For example:
To avoid confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs), collect and evaluate all available objective/factual evidence before reaching judgment.
Implicit/cognitive bias is a well-documented feature of human cognition and may be reinforced by institutional or disciplinary norms, standards and systems that are needlessly narrow, rigid or restrictive. Implicit bias may result from unconscious stereotypes (which often conflict with conscious beliefs) and/or from cognitive shortcuts or heuristics that are consistent, inaccurate and outside our conscious awareness. Take advantage of the variety of resources to help committee members understand implicit bias, such as this video series made available for public use by UCLA.
The biases listed below are adapted from “Rising above Cognitive Errors Guidelines for Search, Tenure Review and Other Evaluation Committees” by JoAnn Moody, PhD, JD.
Structural Bias refers to societal or institutional patterns and practices that advantage some and disadvantage others based on identity. These typically result from norms, standards, patterns, policies, procedures, practices and symbols that reflect the status quo or dominant perspective. Examples of structural bias include failing to mitigate cognitive bias (because we assume our systems are “fair”), establishing needlessly narrow qualifications and standards, judging candidates on their ability to self-promote rather than on their ability to do the job, judging “professionalism” by how accurately candidates meet our institutional/disciplinary norms, marketing the unit/university/community to a narrow set of interests, etc.
Like most higher education institutions, Oregon State University has several initiatives to support faculty hiring. These include: