When Beau Breslin, dean of the faculty at Skidmore College, looks in the mirror he sees a “dinosaur,” i.e., a “white, male, heterosexual, upper-middle-class, Ivy League guy.” As Vimal Patel wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few days ago:
Historically, he often explains to faculty members, applicants like him have been the main conception of a great faculty candidate — the person who went to an elite college and was able to amass an excellent publication history and teaching record, often partly because of the financial resources that allowed him to do so.
“That is one demonstration of significant chops when it comes to teaching our students,” Mr. Breslin says. “But it’s only one perspective of what makes for excellence. If we’re in the business of having a faculty that really does mirror the community, we have to have many perspectives of what constitutes excellence.”
And one of the ways to do that is to make sure that a trained “diversity advocate” serves on all hiring committees and two administrators intervene before too many applications have been dropped.
So at Skidmore, at least, dean of the faculty Breslin is no dinosaur. He’s the wave of the present, and possibly the future.
The dinosaurs are those who continue to believe that liberal arts colleges should strive to hire the best teachers and scholars they can find, because valuing the best teaching and scholarship is much more than simply “one perspective of what constitutes excellence” and because colleges are not ”in the business of having a faculty that really does mirror the community.”