Education Commons^™

Faculty Diversity, Kyle Scafide, Barbara Johnson

Kyle Scafide

This article presents a broad view of issues related to faculty diversity. Headings include Demographics, The Growth of Faculty Diversity as an Ideal, and Barriers in the Academic Workplace. Race, ethnicity, and gender are the most common characteristics that institutions observe in order to measure faculty diversity. An even broader approach to faculty diversity involves age, socioeconomic background, national origin, sexual orientation, and diverse learning styles and opinions. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, the professoriate in the western world was composed almost exclusively of privileged, heterosexual males of Caucasian descent. Higher education institutions are generally concerned with …