Dr. Abena Ampofoa Asare, an Associate Professor of Modern African Affairs & History @ Stony Brook University, recently published an article entitled "​Notes of a DEI Search Chair” in Inside Higher Ed. Dr. Asare was also a Co-Chair on the IDEA Fellows search committee at SBU.

Without certain conditions, a search amounts to a public devaluing of scholars who have historically been marginalized within the academy, argues Abena Ampofoa Asare.

What do you do when you become a co-chair of a diversity, equity and inclusion search committee charged with increasing faculty diversity? You write notes.

Note 1: On Violence
Malika Jeffries-EL’s recent article for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “How do we mitigate the impact of systemic bias on faculty from underrepresented groups?” begins with a chart titled “Percentage of U.S. Faculty Within the Ranks of Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor by Race.” Based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics, this image, with its towering blue columns of white male and white female professors looming over barely perceptible multicolored slivers corresponding to Black, Latinx and Asian faculty, is presumably the context for the DEI faculty search.

​This chart should be projected onto a large screen. It should be a figure of contemplation. How do we, on the DEI search, explain this disparity? Are we willing to address this? And if so, how?
We struggle to speak clearly of the processes through which U.S. higher education creates and reproduces itself as an exclusionary space. Behind these statistics, I see doors slammed shut, the bowed heads of discouraged scholars, rows of brilliant children tumbling into the euphemistically named “achievement gap.” DEI, the series of letters strung together in a well-meaning row, does not make it any easier to speak of the jagged histories that fuel the chart.

       Alithia Alleyne                                 Kyle R. Fennell                         Wesam Hassanin
     Program Administrator                 Coordinator of Communications             Executive Assistant to
Occupational Therapy Program             & Enrollment Technologies         the Vice President and Provost
         SUNY Downstate                                    SUNY Canton                                Stony Brook University

               Gwen Kay                               Peter L. Knuepfer                           Colleen Lemza
                  Professor                             Associate Professor of Geology               Professor and Chair
    Graduate Program Director             and Environmental Studies           Journalism and Public Relations
             SUNY Oswego                        Chair, Dept. of Earth Sciences                 SUNY Plattsburgh
                                                                     Binghamton University

               Jan Trybula                                                                                                     Jie Zhang
          Associate Professor                                                                                               Professor
         Biology Department                                                                         Education & Human Development
             SUNY Potsdam                                                                                                SUNY Brockport