This academic year, 25 professors joined the faculty, representing a wide range of academic fields.
The economics department had the most hires. Leila Agha, Na’ama Shenhav and Dmitry Taubinsky are newly minted assistant professors; Treb Allen is a distinguished associate professor of economics and globalization. Agha taught Economics 10, “Introduction to Statistical Methods,” this past fall. Oyebola Okunogbe ’06 is completing her postdoctoral research at the World Bank and will be joining the faculty in two years.
Chair of the economics department Christopher Snyder attributes the department’s aggressive recruiting to the department’s and faculty turnover, notwithstanding that economics is the College’s most popular major.
“We received applications from over 700 Ph.D. economists,” he said.
But despite the volume of applicants, recruiting is still a balancing act, Snyder said.
The College is competing with other top schools for candidates, so the department tends to recruit in the subfields in which it is strongest — international economics, development economics, applied economics and microeconomics chief among them.
The department is unusual, however, as the College does not have a graduate program for economics. Nonetheless, Synder pointed out that what the College lacks in Ph.D. granting programs it makes up in community and opportunities.
“People like to go to places that have a stimulating research environment,” he said. “Teaching and researching with undergraduates has its own appeal.”
Furthermore, because the College does not have an economics graduate program, faculty are free to concentrate in an economic subfield, Snyder said.
He noted that the department will not be recruiting during the next academic year because the new hires were employed through the academic cluster initiative, College President Phil Hanlon’s collaborative, targeted-hiring plan that aims to recruit cohorts of scholars focused on specific themes, questions and social issues.
The gender ratio of the new group of hires differs from that of the College. Of the 25 hires, 11 are men and 14 are women, while there are more male faculty than female at the College overall. The percentage of male faculty at the College has hovered between 60.5 and 61.1 percent from 2011 to 2015, while the percentage of female faculty has gone down since 2012 — from 38.9 percent to 39.5 percent.
Associate provost for institutional research Alicia Betsinger said that there are a number of initiatives underway to combat hiring bias in the College’s recruiting practices.
“Nothing in the data is manifesting just yet,” she said. “However, given the new initiatives and faculty expansion plans for [the] Thayer [School of Engineering], there should be movement in the next couple of years.”
Thayer remains the least diverse branch of the College. From 2011 to 2015, men have made up between 82 and 86.2 percent of the faculty at Thayer, while women have made up 13.8 to 18 percent. Furthermore, minorities and internationals have made up 14 to 22 percent and three to four percent of faculty at Thayer respectively, while whites have made up 77.6 to 84 percent. The only new hire for Thayer this year, Geoffrey Parker, is male.
One of the six initiatives announced under President Hanlon’s Action Plan for Inclusive Excellence is increasing faculty diversity. It is divided into 15 subgoals, of which one is complete, eight are in progress and six are in planning. The completed task was doubling the faculty diversity recruitment fund.
The College is not alone, however, in striving to increase faculty diversity.
“It is a national trend,” special assistant to the President Christianne Wohlforth said. “The academy needs to do a better job at retaining faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds.”
Consequently, the College is targeting the working pipeline by ensuring that students with diverse backgrounds who would like to pursue a career in academia receive support through programs like the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which has placed undergraduates in Ph.D. programs around the country.
But Wohlforth acknowledges competition in the marketplace, as the College is competing with other universities in a regional market. In other words, location matters, so the College must leverage its rural environment to attract new talent. Wohlforth was, however, pleased by the College’s success in this regard this year.
“This is the most diverse group of incoming faculty in recent years, which is great,” Wohlforth said.
The Action Plan of Inclusive Excellence is still a work in progress. Nonetheless, it aims to increase the percentage of underrepresented tenure-track faculty institution-wide from 16 percent to 25 percent by 2020.
Correction Appended (January 13, 2017):
The original version of this article quoted special assistant to the President Christianne Wohlforth as saying that Dartmouth needs to do a better job retaining faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds. In fact, Wohlforth was speaking about the academic community as a whole.
