But progress on faculty diversity has stalled. That has wide-ranging implications for everything from university completion rates for students of color to the presence of new voices in medical research.

Universities deserve much of the blame, for they implemented programs to diversify the faculty that their own social scientists had long ago shown to be ineffective.

On Monday 18 November, the Sociology research department welcomes Professor Frank Dobbin, for a lecture on his analysis of the efficacy of diversity programs at 600 schools over 20 years. It sheds light on how universities can build faculties that look more like their students and wider societies in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity.

About Frank Dobbin

Frank Dobbin is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.  His Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton U. Press 2009) shows how HR managers and activists defined what it meant to discriminate in the eyes of the law, broadening the definition over time. His Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't with Alexandra Kalev (Harvard U. Press [Belknap] 2022) looks at the effectiveness of dozens of different diversity programs, in over 800 companies across more than 30 years, to answer the questions: Which programs help, which hurt, and how can harmful programs be improved?  Dobbin and Kalev are now investigating university programs designed to promote faculty diversity, using similar methods to sort out which are most effective.