Dear CSUN President Beck and Provost Walker, 

In September 2021, Provost Walker released the Faculty Hiring Equity Initiative. These initiatives include central funding for outreach and postings, new training modules for recruitment committees, creating College-specific Faculty Equity and Compliance Representatives, and implementing the Common Human Resources System (CHRS or PageUp). Moreover, the Office of the Provost has announced that CSUN is fully committed to advancing faculty diversity. 

These initiatives were a direct result of our advocacy (see The Daily Sundial​; Official List of Demands to CSU Northridge​; Virtual Event with President Beck) and demonstrate the university’s capacity to ensure equity in our faculty hiring and advance faculty diversity. That is why we are now urging the administration to utilize cluster hiring. Cluster hiring is hiring multiple scholars into one or more departments based on shared, interdisciplinary research interests. It involves an aggressive approach to capture large and diverse pools of candidates who bring impressive research and teaching portfolios. Research demonstrates that cluster hiring is effective at advancing faculty diversity. 

In response to our Official Questions for Provost Walker, the Provost wrote, “Thank you for referencing the use of cluster hires as a promising practice. That is one of many innovative practices that universities have employed. Please know that we are exploring many best practices and programs for implementation here at CSUN.”

Implementing promising, innovative practices, such as cluster hiring, as a means to diversify CSUN professors is vital for many reasons. For example, in August 2020, CSUN committed to providing funding and an action plan to recruit, retain and promote Black faculty, staff, and administrators in response to the racial justice movement. Unfortunately, however, we have not seen these gains. In addition, the College of Engineering and Computer Science has zero Black tenured faculty (CSUN Counts, 2020). 

The lack of diverse faculty is also gaining mainstream media attention. For instance, in July 2021, ABC News published an article titled, Lack of diversity in higher learning can be a problem for diverse student bodies. The article reported that non-white students at universities with more diverse faculty have higher graduation rates (see Stout et al., 2018​; Llamas et al., 2019​; Cross and Carman, 2021). In addition, in September 2021, ABC News published an article titled, Latino representation in college faculty lags in SoCal - How experts say schools can address it. The article stated that in colleges and universities across LA County, almost half of all students are Latinx, compared to just 11% of faculty. 

Although CSUN has established the Faculty Hiring Initiative and is fully committed to advancing faculty diversity, students will not have sufficient “evidence of equity to which the campus is committed” until they see real gains. Consider that San Diego State University (also a CSU) has increased its Black faculty members by 12 since the summer of George Floyd protests. Dr. J. Luke Wood is the vice president for student affairs and campus diversity, chief diversity officer, and a distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University. Wood asserted that San Diego State’s number one strategy was cluster hiring. 

Another report found that from 2011 to 2014, the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa implemented 4 cluster hires. As a result, five of seven of those hired into the sustainability cluster were women—three of whom were native Hawaiian. One of those women was the first female native Hawaiian scholar ever to be hired in engineering in the university’s 150-year history. Additionally, between 2014 and 2015, Emory’s tenure-track faculty hires only included 15% from historically excluded (i.e., underrepresented) groups. However, between 2017 and 2019, that number shot up to 51%. Dr. Carla Freeman is a senior associate dean of faculty at Emory University’s College of Arts and Science. In an article published by The Chronicle of Higher Edcuation, Freeman credited cluster hiring as the mechanism that made these highly significant gains possible.

We must also be resistant to the argument that university departments can not find qualified people of color. Dr. Tyrone Howard is a professor of education and the associate dean for equity and diversity at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Service. In a statement to ABC, Howard said he does not believe that university departments can not find qualified people of color, especially when universities can find plenty of students of color to play on athletic teams. He said, “So, we have the formula we just don't apply in the academic realm like we do in the athletic realm."

Howard also said research has shown schools retain more faculty of color when they hire more than one person of color. This is consistent with the account of Dr. Ebony McGee, an associate professor of diversity and STEM education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, and an associate professor of medicine, health, and society in its teaching-and-learning department. In an article published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, McGee wrote, “No more hiring a lone Black academic every four to five years. Employ cluster hiring as the model for recruiting and retaining Black faculty. Just like white faculty members have their crew, we need our posse as well. Hire three or more of us at a time.”

The act of hiring diverse faculty together, as clusters, ensures to enhance their experience as individual faculty members. Being part of a cluster—whether within a single department or across disciplines—can mitigate the isolation often felt by people from a historically excluded (i.e., underrepresented) demographic at CSUN. Collectively, these clusters begin to shift the conversations and enrich department-level and campus culture more broadly.

We recognize that successful cluster hiring requires substantial funds, foresight, vigorous outreach, and profound and widespread collaboration. Yet, we call on President Beck and Provost Walker to enact bold leadership and prescience through creating plans that will reserve certain positions throughout CSUN to be part of a cluster hire.

***If you are a CSUN student, alumni, faculty, community member, please be sure to include your name/class/department in the comment***