Universities say they’re increasing faculty diversity. Is that translating to change overall? Review the data take action, and join the discussion here.

paper By J. Nathan Matias, Neil Lewis Jr., and Elan Hope

U.S. universities have made public commitments to recruit and retain faculty of color. Analysis of three federal datasets shows that at current rates, diversity in U.S. faculty will never reach racial parity. Yet colleges and universities could achieve parity by 2050 by diversifying their faculty 0.78 more percentage points per year.

This landing page provides full links and details for our Comment paper in Nature Human Behavior, our data analysis, and what you can do to work toward demographic parity by 2025.

• Matias, J.N., Lewis, N. A., Hope, E. (2022) U.S. Universities Are Not Succeeding in Diversifying Faculty. Nature Human Behavior. DOI:10.1038/s41562-022-01495-4
• Code and data
• Repository on the Open Science Framework, including early preprint

Shareable images (please link to our paper and cite @natematias, @NeilLewisJr, and @HopesPsychology if you share on Twitter or Mastodon):

• R1 Projections
• Ivy+ Projections
• Liberal Arts Projections

If you are interested in your institution’s position in relation to relevant institution groups, the code and data listed above includes projections for every Carnegie category, US News category, and Opportunity Insights category, alongside code to generate similar charts.

How You Can Take Action

We hope our article inspires action and research, in addition to conversation.

• If you are interested to work toward demographic parity by 2050, please sign up for this newsletter hosted by our collaborators at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This low-volume, occasional list will share more information about some exciting upcoming opportunities once we are ready to share more
• If you want to discuss the findings and their implications, we encourage you to take the conversation to r/science on Reddit, where a group of over a thousand scientists moderate conversations about new scientific publications

Supporting Journalists (Including Students) Writing About Faculty Diversity

Are you a journalist interested to write about faculty diversity at your local college/university? Or are you the advisor of a student newspaper? Our team has generated per-institution trend data and are sharing it with local journalists and student journalists who are reporting on faculty diversity questions at your institutions.

For more information and access to the data, please write us at nathan.matias@cornell.edu and include [faculty-diversity] in the subject line.

When you write your story, share the link with us, and we will add it to this page.

Frequently Asked Questions

We know that faculty diversity is a much-discussed topic across the US and internationally, and we want to engage respectfully with what we expect could be a high volume conversation. To support that conversation, we are posting a Frequently-Asked-Questions document here, which we will update with our answers to common questions.