February 16, 2006
Play holds a mirror up to faculty hiring
The members of the computer science department faculty search committee entered Room 310 of the HUB chatting idly, and sat down to begin their work.
They noted the absence of certain colleagues, dickered briefly about meeting schedules and use of the departmental copy machine. Then they addressed the question of the day: deciding which of two talented faculty candidates, one male, one female, the department would hire. Of the six people present, only one was female. Which person would they choose?
Before you make your guess, there’s more to know.
This was not a real search committee meeting, but an interactive theater presentation performed by a group from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT), at the University of Michigan. The CRLT Theater Program uses interactive theater techniques to, as its press notes say, “engage audience members in thinking and talking about issues of pedagogy, diversity and inclusion in the classroom.”
The session, one of two performed on campus last week by the players, was sponsored by the ADVANCE program, an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation that seeks to improve the lives and work of women in engineering and the sciences, at the UW and elsewhere; and the UW Training Collective, created collaboratively by the Gateway Center, the Minority Think Tank and the Q Center.
The CRLT players perform scenarios on a number of campus issues, from mentoring to classroom conflicts and more. This short play, titled The Faculty Meeting, was about gender and power dynamics in hiring, an issue close to the heart of the ADVANCE program.
The faux meeting commenced, with dozens of UW faculty members, administrators and department chairs — the very ones who make real departmental hiring decisions at the UW — looking on.
It wasn’t long before the observers began chuckling and shaking their heads knowingly at the personality quirks, biases and eccentricities revealed in the skit. A laugh spread through the room when one committee member mentioned the need for “diversity of gender” and the others nodded automatically, unthinkingly agreeing “Of course! Of course!”
The two candidates clearly differed in their experience and range of interests. The male was described as a solid researcher already collaborating with a couple of the faculty. His area of research was operating systems, a fairly mainstream path for computer science faculty. The woman, a talented post-doc, was researching the interface between computers and humans, seen by some as a less substantial line of research.
Gender bias reared its head early on, when one committee member said of the female candidate’s research, “We need something a little bit harder than what is really glorified social work!”
The lone woman on the search committee supported hiring the female candidate, saying, “This is a chance to build up the area.” Another committee member voiced concern that, if hired, the woman might make “family plans” that would take her away from her work.
The scene finished with the department chair declaring that he would forward the name of the male candidate to the dean for hiring.
Audience members then got to ask questions of the troupe while the actors stayed “in character” for their replies (“I want to hear from the pompous one on the end!” one person called out). During this, the faux faculty stuck close to the themes and views from the script. One younger faculty member said he could not support the woman candidate because “I’m going up for tenure soon — I can’t be the one advocating for someone nobody wants.”
It was next the observers’ turn, to critique the ruminations of this fictional search committee. Suggestions came readily, including:
- the chair was too heavy-handed in the meeting;
- the committee should have decided what level of professional experience they were seeking before identifying candidates;
- minority views were marginalized;
- missing faculty were not sufficiently accounted for;
- too much was discussed in private, without a quorum;
- the idea of seeking permission from the dean to hire both strong candidates was not discussed.
Ron Irving, divisional dean of natural sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, said despite certain exaggerations by the actors for effect, the session seemed a fairly accurate portrayal. “I thought it was done well enough to be genuinely illuminating rather than a mild curiosity,” he said.
Indeed, he said, committee chairs often must exert control, “but it shows how bad, how ineffective, how imappropriate a certain kind of control can be,” Irving noted. He said the skit reminded him “we should always pay attention to the message we are sending when we are controlling.”
He said it would be too simplistic to view the committee members depicted in terms of good and bad: “Everyone gets it some of the time,” Irving said. Still, unconscious biases can affect even well-intentioned efforts.
David Hodge, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who also attended the session, said the play touched on critical elements of leadership such as those embraced by President Emmert’s universitywide leadership and values initiative, begun last spring.
Hodge also said it was revealing that the committee members portrayed didn’t reach out more to candidates of diversity as they conducted their search. The UW has improved in such efforts, he said. “I am giving us a decent report card,” Hodge said. “But we still need to talk about using the search process as a recruitment process.”
Joyce Yen, program/research manager for the ADVANCE office and member of the Training Collective, called the session “a powerful way to see what your experience is like without it being too close to home,” adding that it was made that way by the quality of the performers.
“It was so impactful — people came away saying ‘Wow, that was really amazing.'”
Yen said the UW Training Collective and ADVANCE are investigating the possibility of creating a similar group here at the UW.
For more information on the CRLT Theater Program, visit online at http://www.crlt.umich.edu/.
For more information about the ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change, visit online at http://www.engr.washington.edu/advance/.
