A recent internal investigation into faculty hiring at the University of Washington reveals the exhaustive efforts that universities make to discriminate against white job applicants. After the university’s Department of Psychology identified a white candidate as best qualified for a tenure-track professor position in early 2023, the department’s Diversity Advisory Committee pressured the hiring committee to re-rank candidates in accordance with the methodology laid out in an internal handbook titled “Promising Practices for Increasing Equity in Faculty Searches” so that a black woman would receive the job instead. This handbook, obtained by the National Association of Scholars, spells out how to exclude candidates of undesirable races and ensure that candidates of preferred races get hired.
The handbook sheds light on past discriminatory hiring practices in the psychology department. In the 2020–21 academic year, the department hired only BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) candidates for five tenure-track positions. Delighted by its success in excluding all white candidates, the department’s Diversity Advisory Committee commissioned the “Promising Practices” handbook as a case study documenting its past manipulation of the hiring process. The handbook served as a how-to manual in the 2022–2023 academic year, ensuring that a BIPOC candidate would be hired for the department’s only tenure-track professorship that year.
First, the handbook advises recruiters to “prepare for success” by developing a strategy for how to hire based on race. To guarantee nonwhite candidates, recruiters should reach out directly to underrepresented minority (URM) candidates. The department’s search committee “sent over 100 personal emails, primarily to URM researchers.” The handbook carefully ranks favored minority groups, specifically “Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, or American Indian/Indigenous,” above less preferred ones, specifically “Asian American or Middle Eastern American.”
Next, the handbook recommends drafting job descriptions that match the resumes of specific minority candidates. That way, the applications will perfectly suit the job posting. It directs institutions to “[v]isualize your ideal candidates and work backwards from there to word your advertisement. If you could pick anyone, with an eye towards URM scholars, which current scholars in your field would be the best fit for this job? How do they describe their work and goals? Consider using similar language.”
A hiring committee should also refrain from evaluating candidate competence. Committees should “[d]econstruct how evaluating candidates” on their productivity, verbal communication skills, or leadership “may advantage privileged groups over underrepresented groups.”
