On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education

The law now requires the elimination of discriminatory practices and equality of access for all persons regardless of race or sex; moral justice requires an end to prejudice and an increase of opportunities for those who have been denied them in the past by prejudice; enlightened self-interest requires that an institution reexamine its priorities where standards of merit are concerned, to revitalize the intellectual life of the community through the utilization of heretofore untapped resources. Most important, insofar as the university aspires to discover, preserve, and transmit knowledge and experience not for one group or selected groups, but for all people, to that extent it must broaden its perception of who shall be responsible for this discovery, preservation, and transmission. In so doing, it broadens the base of intellectual inquiry and lays the foundation of more human social practices.

Broad representation of faculty members—in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity—is essential to fulfill the promise of academic freedom to deepen existing disciplinary approaches and open new disciplinary paths, including the study of inequality and discrimination, methods for dismantling them, and strategies for reform and fundamental change. We now understand that, in order to address systemic and institutional forms of inequality, a more expansive conception of discrimination must emphasize substantive and not merely formal equality.

Antidiscrimination law’s primary model of “formal” equality seeks to expand equality of opportunity by requiring equal treatment of individuals who are “alike” or “similarly situated.” For example, a woman and a man with PhDs in mechanical engineering should receive equal consideration as applicants for a faculty position in the mechanical engineering department. Feminist and critical race scholars maintain that such formal abstractions promote illusions of color-blindness and gender neutrality and tell us little about the lived and material experiences of marginalized groups.⁴

Formal equality by itself will not eliminate the conditions of social and economic subordination that maintain systemic racial, gender, and class-based inequality. A “substantive equality” approach, which is concerned primarily with achieving equitable outcomes that address the conditions and experiences of marginalized groups living in a deeply unequal society, is also needed. Requiring equal treatment, while necessary and essential, cannot by itself eliminate conditions of social and economic subordination that perpetuate racial, gender, and other status-based inequalities created by past discriminatory practices and maintained by inherited systems and structures.

 Even were these problems not the fault of anyone living—which is highly unlikely—that would not make them less real. Not only does the formal equality paradigm severely constrict legal intervention, but it also fails to allow for an adequate consideration of context, that is, the specific conditions under which both individual and collective experiences of discrimination and status-based oppression occur. That history and context must be considered in addressing material and cultural inequality and must guide our understanding of discrimination.⁵

Affirmative Action

Affirmative action in student admissions has been one focus of the attack on racial and gender diversity. As noted above, in 2023 the US Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious student admissions policies employed by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This decision overturned more than forty years of Supreme Court precedent permitting colleges and universities to adopt student admissions programs that consider an applicant’s race as part of a holistic evaluation process.⁶

Even after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard and UNC cases, however, colleges and universities can and should continue efforts to achieve diversity in the student body, which even the court’s conservative majority agreed are “commendable goals.” These efforts include recruiting student applicants from diverse socioeconomic and regional backgrounds and first-generation college applicants, as well as engaging in a holistic admissions review that considers all aspects of applicants’ background, experience, and accomplishments without using racial classifications. Colleges and universities should also increase student financial assistance and create an inclusive and supportive climate for all admitted students. 

We thus reaffirm the following description of affirmative action in the AAUP’s 1973 report: “What is sought in the idea of affirmative action is essentially the revision of standards and practices to ensure that institutions are in fact drawing from the largest marketplace of human resources in staffing their faculties and a critical review of appointment and advancement criteria to ensure that they do not inadvertently foreclose consideration of the best-qualified persons by untested presuppositions which operate to exclude women and minorities.”

Unconscious Bias

It should go without saying that overt and intentional barriers based on discriminatory criteria in recruiting, evaluating, and promoting faculty members and in all other employment decisions must be eliminated. But intentional discrimination is only one aspect of racial and gender exclusion. Bias and stereotyping often function at an unconscious level, where they play a powerful role in such decisions. Thus, to exercise discretion fairly in employment decisions, it is essential that faculty members, as well as administrators and governing boards, be educated about the nature of unconscious bias and how it may affect judgments of merit in all aspects of professional and social relations.⁷ Unconscious bias may influence a wide range of judgments, such as evaluations of a candidate’s or colleague’s academic rigor, potential to achieve “excellence” and professional distinction, ability to be “objective” in their work, the level of their contributions as a coauthor, and so on. Unconscious bias may also be expressed in personal assessments, such as descriptions of a candidate or colleague as overly aggressive or outspoken, difficult to work with, unreasonable, unsociable, or lacking in “collegiality.” Scholars with a disability may be unfairly judged based on unfounded but common assumptions about the limits that a given condition may impose.

Education and training for faculty members and administrators about the nature of discrimination and unconscious bias should be governed, supervised, and led by elected faculty governance bodies as part of their primary responsibilities in hiring, promotion, and peer review. This work should be remunerated and count toward professional milestones, such as promotion and tenure. Further, it is incumbent on faculty members to raise issues of bias for discussion when they observe them in recruitment or promotion-review processes.

Academic departments and programs should seek scholars with new perspectives or work in emerging disciplinary fields to maintain the intellectual vitality of academic programs and create opportunities to increase faculty diversity. Administrations should provide adequate resources and support for gender, race, and ethnic studies programs not only because these have become indispensable disciplines in contemporary scholarship, but also because, along with the recruitment of a diverse faculty in all disciplines, the expertise of faculty members who specialize in these fields can play a central part in ensuring the education of faculty members and administrators. Shared governance should also be fully engaged in the appointment of administrators to ensure that they are fully committed to achieving substantive equality throughout the institution.

Tenure and Contingency

Progress toward substantive equality also requires colleges and universities to address systemic employment inequalities created since the 1980s with the shift to a largely contingent academic workforce. Some scholars have suggested that it is no coincidence that the casualization of the professoriate developed just as women and scholars of color began to enter the profession in greater numbers and to challenge notions of universality, neutrality, and objectivity that are too often employed as weapons of privilege. Even as disciplines such as racial and gender studies have expanded and there has been an increase—however inadequate—in appointments of women and faculty members of color, the scope of tenure protections has severely contracted, with a disproportionate impact on these same scholars. 

Today, over two-thirds (68 percent) of instructional faculty members hold contingent appointments that are ineligible for tenure. By contrast, in the mid-1980s, about 53 percent of the faculty members were tenured or on the tenure track.⁸ Insecure employment, declining salaries, and increased workloads, as well as the consequent erosion of academic freedom and shared governance, have made the academic profession increasingly unattractive to talented individuals. The casualization of academic labor combined with persistent legacies of past discrimination and the deleterious effects of present-day bias make it hardly surprising that members of previously excluded groups may be reluctant to choose an academic career. Moreover, they are more likely to find themselves in positions of economic precarity due to burdensome student-loan debts.⁹

If, as the 1973 report declared and this statement reaffirms, “further improvement of quality in higher education and the elimination of discrimination due to race or sex are not at odds with each other, but at one,” then progress toward substantive equality is tightly bound to extending institutional structures and employment conditions in which fundamental principles of academic freedom are protected by the employment security of tenure and due process. Shared governance and collective bargaining can contribute to institutionalizing these protections in university policy, strengthened by provisions that address gender and racial equity in employment conditions.

Criteria, Standards, and Procedures

Eliminating barriers and enhancing fairness and inclusiveness in faculty recruitment and promotion demand regular and periodic review of criteria and standards. “Where a long period of time has passed since any serious study has been made to review the effects and the assumptions of stated or unstated standards of appointment and advancement (or where no study was ever made, but the standards were simply adopted on the strength of common custom and plausible hypothesis), it would be reasonable in any case to expect a conscientious faculty to reconsider the matter from time to time,” the 1973 report declared. The report continued,

When the use of certain unexamined standards tends to operate to the overwhelming disadvantage of persons of a particular sex or race who have already been placed at a great disadvantage by other social forces (not exclusive of past practices within higher education itself), it is even more reasonable to expect that an institution of higher learning would especially consider its standards in light of that fact as well: to determine whether it is inadvertently depriving itself of a larger field of potential scholars and teachers than simple economy requires, even while compounding the effects of prior discrimination generally. We cannot assume uncritically that present criteria of merit and procedures for their application have yielded the excellence intended; to the extent that the use of certain standards has resulted in the exclusion of women and minorities from professional positions in higher education, or their inclusion only in token proportions to their availability, the academy has denied itself access to the critical mass of intellectual vitality represented by these groups. We believe that such criteria must thus be considered deficient on the very grounds of excellence itself.