This is the fourth in a series of stories detailing actions CALS students, faculty and staff have taken over the past year to make our community a more diverse, equitable and inclusive place for everyone. Here, we highlight some of the strategies CALS and its community members are adopting to improve diversity in faculty, staff and student recruitment and retention.
As a graduate student, Chelsea Specht appreciated being part of a diverse community of scholars. The variety of life experiences, identities and research topics among her fellow students contributed to a richness that benefited everyone’s scholarship, she said.
“And then as I got further and further in academia, that richness disappeared,” said Specht, the Barbara McClintock Professor of Plant Biology. Specht experienced the “leaky pipeline” phenomenon, in which women and people of color disproportionately leave academia, including in the sciences.
As a new assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Specht watched the same pattern play out with her students.
“We had Latina students coming into these academic spaces with amazing stories, talents and skills yet feeling impostor syndrome, as women, as first-generation students and as being from identities underrepresented and marginalized in academia,” she said. “And I would see these fantastic students question their own abilities in ways that made them slower to publish, slower to voice their ideas, slower to apply for grants or awards for which they were fully eligible. Then I’d see the male students coming from top universities who would never question themselves.”
Supporting diversity, equity and inclusion became central to Specht’s work. She is the director of DEI for the Botanical Society of America, and she’s part of two new National Science Foundation projects focused on leading cultural change to support diversity and belonging in the plant sciences. And as CALS’ first associate dean for diversity and inclusion, she spearheads the college’s efforts to support recruitment and retention of students and faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds, and she serves on the steering committee for Cornell’s NIH FIRST award.
“We are actively recruiting students from backgrounds that before we might have said, ‘They don’t have the scores to survive at Cornell; they’re not gonna do well here,’” Specht said. “But now we’re realizing that ‘not doing well here’ is the direct result of the environment we create. So our charge is to humbly, critically self-assess what we as an institution need to do, not just to support students and faculty, but to change our own structures and processes to enable these diverse voices to lead our community in becoming a culture of inclusive excellence.”
Structural changes supporting DEI
Over the past two years, CALS has taken steps to improve its recruitment and retention of diverse students and faculty. Here are just a few of them:
- CALS is undertaking its first-ever faculty cluster hire initiative aimed at creating solutions to grand challenges in equity and inclusion. At least five scholars whose work addresses ongoing systemic challenges facing historically marginalized communities will be hired as a cohort starting this summer.
- The graduate fields of food science, entomology, geological sciences, atmospheric sciences and all six fields affiliated with the School of Integrative Plant Science have dropped the GRE as a requirement for grad school applications, as scores show little correlation with graduate school success but a strong correlation with race and wealth. Admission relies upon academic performance and demonstrated potential, leadership, research activities, and recommendations and personal statements that indicate teamwork, motivation, persistence, resilience and creativity especially in overcoming obstacles.
- Departments across CALS are making progress in faculty gender parity, using recruitment strategies developed by the university’s Strategic Oversight Committee. The Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has achieved faculty gender parity for the first time, and the Department of Microbiology will achieve near-gender parity among faculty this year: five male and four female. Across CALS, 36 percent of the faculty are women.
- CALS and its departments have developed multiple peer-mentoring programs that connect incoming freshmen with more advanced undergraduates, to enhance students’ academic skills, well-being and retention. CALS has also created a new position, director of inclusive academic advising, which will oversee efforts to recruit, retain and support underrepresented and first-generation students. The new director, Rhonda Todd, began Jan. 3.
- CALS is hiring a director for diversity and inclusion with an expanded scope of responsibilities to work with faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and staff to build programs and engage in practices that institutionalize belonging and inclusion in CALS.
"Diversity creates a much more vibrant community with new opportunities for learning," Specht said.
Cluster hiring to support faculty diversity
Universitywide, Cornell has dedicated significant effort to increasing faculty diversity and supporting faculty retention. CALS also seeks to dramatically ramp up its capacity to address issues of racism, inequality and social justice in its research, teaching and outreach through a collegewide cohort hire of at least five faculty members. The effort mirrors one made by the College of Human Ecology, which recently announced a similar cluster hire of eight new faculty members. As a cohort, CALS leaders hope the new faculty members will work collaboratively and across disciplines, addressing systemic issues via interdisciplinary lenses to increase the impact of their research. They also anticipate that the cohort will support each other in their academic career development and aid in their collective well-being and long-term commitment to Cornell.
“It’s really hard to be the ‘only’ or one of few of any identity in a department,” said Specht, who was honored as a “Faculty Champion” at Cornell’s annual Graduate Diversity and Inclusion Awards ceremony this year. “Students who share that identity flock to you as an adviser, and even if you really enjoy advising, it does become a tax of time and energy. We hope that hiring a group of faculty who share values, commitment and life experiences can provide some supportive benefit to the members of that cohort, expand the impact of our research and challenge our collegewide policies in promotion and tenure to center inclusive excellence and impact as defined by our inspirational early-career scholars.”
