Monitoring Faculty Diversity: The Need for a More Granular Approach

The slow growth of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in higher education, as measured by the customarily used institution-wide aggregate percentage, hides a more severe clustering by race/ethnicity. This effect is revealed only when one takes into account the departments or units into which URM faculty have been hired. A new approach is proposed for measuring faculty diversity that takes into account this additional factor. The effectiveness of the new approach is illustrated using data from a large private university.