A recently published study of tenure and promotion cases for nearly 1,600 faculty members across five universities didn't find racial disparities in either provosts' decisions or in department-level tenure and promotion committees' recommendations on which professors should advance.
But the study, published earlier this month in Nature Human Behaviour, did find a divergence in the middle of the process -- when collegewide committees weigh in.
There, underrepresented minority faculty, defined as Black, African American or Hispanic, received 7 percent more negative votes from individual committee members than white or Asian faculty. And underrepresented minority faculty were a full 44 percent less likely to receive unanimous recommendations from these college-level committees.
While a unanimous recommendation isn't required for a promotion and tenure, the study's authors note it's considered a "gold standard." They wrote that, because "faculty probably learn about the voting results through their network," negative votes may make underrepresented minority professors feel less supported.
"Learning that a portion of one's colleagues did not vote for your tenure or promotion is likely to lead to greater feelings of isolation and a lack of belonging," they wrote. "Second, even if they do not learn about the result of the vote, the other (senior) faculty members will know. Receiving more negative votes may therefore make other faculty members view [underrepresented minority] faculty as less competent academics, potentially affecting the likelihood of seeking collaborative relationships or advocating for colleagues."
Perhaps it shouldn't be a gold standard. Christiane Spitzmueller -- one of the authors and a psychology professor and vice provost for academic affairs and strategy at the University of California, Merced -- said a lack of unanimity only requires "a single person who brings potentially negative attitudes towards marginalized groups to the voting process."
"There's limited discussion oftentimes, and then oftentimes it's anonymous," she said of promotion and tenure decisions. "People write on a piece of paper whether it be yes or a no, so nobody is held accountable. So people who think, 'Oh, maybe there are too many faculty of color in the academy now, or the standards have been lowered' ... Without even having to ever say that, they vote no."
Spitzmueller and her co-authors suggested in the study that because faculty who serve on these college-level committees are more removed from the candidates compared with department-level panels and less likely to be familiar with their research, "they may be more likely to rely on race-based perceptions when making their decision."
Theo Masters-Waage, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Houston and the paper's lead author, surmised that part of the difference between what authors saw from college-level committees compared with department-level ones is "at the department level, the individual has a personal relationship with that faculty member, which means that they know more about them, they might understand their research."
He suspects non-unanimous votes could impact whether professors decide to depart a university even after earning tenure. Masters-Waage said he wants to pursue further research on the "knock-on effects" of non-unanimous votes.
The authors also looked at how faculty members' h-index scores, a common measure of the reach of their research and their research productivity, factored into promotion and tenure decisions for underrepresented minority versus white and Asian faculty. They concluded that the underrepresented minority are "held to a higher standard ... in terms of scholarly productivity." They said this is especially the case for underrepresented minorities who are also women.
Citing concerns about identifying individuals and putting them at risk, Spitzmueller declined to name the five universities involved in the study, which looked at data from 2015 to 2022 collected by the Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement, a 10-university consortium.
The researchers removed two consortium universities from the study that were historically Black. So the five included universities came from eight that are almost entirely in the South: the University of Houston, Texas A&M University, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Rice University, the University of Alabama, Louisiana State University, Lehigh University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The researchers' look at promotion and tenure decisions is part of broader and continuing National Science Foundation-funded work that began at the University of Houston, Spitzmueller said. She said the consortium has now added UC Merced, Purdue University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their work has the potential to help universities address the lack of proportionate representation in academe of Black and Hispanic individuals.
"When you look at the career progression of especially faculty of color in the academy at the full professor level at many institutions, there's almost no one," Spitzmueller said. "Is there potentially bias baked into these decision-making systems that still continues to disadvantage faculty of color?"
Currently, "the academic community is not representative of the society it serves," the authors wrote. In the U.S., where whites and Asians make up 66 percent of the population, they make up 82 percent "of the 840,000 full-time faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions."
"This overrepresentation corresponds to a staggering underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic individuals, who make up 31 percent of the U.S. population but only a tenth of faculty appointments at institutions of higher education," they wrote.
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) releases reports on the racial makeup of the professoriate, showing a melt in the representation of underrepresented minority faculty as faculty rank increases. Melissa Fuesting, associate director of research at CUPA-HR, said in an email that "we don't collect data on the promotion decision rates, but our data definitely dovetails" with the study.
To mitigate issues with bias, the new study's authors recommend, among other things, that authors of promotion and tenure external review letters -- assessments from professors outside the university who work in the candidate's field -- highlight underrepresented minority faculty members' scholarship. That doesn't mean, Spitzmueller said, talking endlessly about contributions to diversity.
"If you're actually trying to be supportive of a faculty member from a marginalized background, that is the exact opposite of what you should be doing," she said. She said that "if, as a letter writer, you want to be supportive, you write about scholarship and you don't write about these extraneous elements, because committees look at those and they might think, 'Oh, gee, there must not be that much there on the substantive scholarly productivity part and the letter writer must be compensating.'"