Expanding Research on Faculty Cluster Hiring
Higher education institutions use faculty cluster hiring to hire multiple scholars based on shared interdisciplinary research interests. While the practice is widely considered to boost racial equity and diversity in faculty hiring, there’s limited research on its effectiveness.
“We don’t have research in the field to help us understand how this practice is being taken up across universities,” says Heather McCambly, assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. “What are the experiences of faculty who are hired in a cluster, and what is the broader impact of these hiring initiatives?”
McCambly, along with co-principal investigators Román Liera and Aireale Rodgers, aims to answer those questions through a new research project funded by a $250,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The two-year, multi-method study, which began in August 2024, analyzes the purposes and outcomes of faculty cluster hiring initiatives at six historically white, research-intensive universities in three states.
“The heart of the study will be in-depth interviews and site visits where we learn across multiple levels, from leadership and department chairs to the cluster hires themselves,” says McCambly. “That qualitative portion will help us create a picture across six institutions of how this practice can be used as a mechanism for culture change.”
According to McCambly, the limited existing research on this topic suggests that faculty cluster hiring can create a support network for the hired faculty and improve the retention of Faculty of Color. The practice can also be used to create a critical mass of Faculty of Color on campus, which has been shown to increase the success rates of Students of Color.
“Undoubtedly, cluster hiring can be an important mechanism to support areas of research and researchers who have, for unjust reasons, been historically marginalized in the academy,” says Rodgers, assistant professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Yet these same initiatives, as we are learning, can ironically reproduce racialized dynamics that perpetuate inequity rather than disrupt it.”
The study’s research team aims to better understand how cluster hiring can help institutions develop more inclusive hiring practices and advance racial equity in the professoriate. A primary goal of the study is to translate the research findings into easily digestible and actionable resources that university administrators can use to (re)design their cluster hiring processes.
“Faculty cluster hiring has the potential to redistribute resources and power because administrative and faculty leaders who champion racial equity could use this organizational mechanism to set the evaluation criteria, including the types of academic and professional experiences, teaching approaches, and research agenda,” says Liera, assistant professor of higher education at Montclair State University. “I firmly believe that if equity-minded administrators and faculty strategically use cluster hiring, they could create possibilities to disrupt whiteness at multiple organizational levels.”
According to McCambly, the importance of research-backed equity initiatives is heightened by a sociopolitical climate where diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are under attack at U.S. colleges nationwide.
“In an environment where some leaders can be afraid to enact high-level equity-oriented initiatives, we want to show how this can continue to be a practice that is legally defensible and just in the context of academic freedom,” says McCambly. “We hope to use this empirical research to remind folks that we can still do this work.”
