Joint Review Boosts Faculty Diversity, Study Finds

Decades after the federal government outlawed racial discrimination in higher education, Black and Hispanic professors remain woefully underrepresented within the tenured and tenure-track faculty ranks.

But according to a new study published in Nature Communications last week, there may be a simple yet high-impact change tenure and promotion committees can make to their evaluation structure: joint review. The study found that reviewing multiple faculty members for tenure and promotion at the same time increased promotion chances for Black and Hispanic faculty by 16.2 percent compared to those who were reviewed separately.

“When minority faculty members are evaluated [separately], often the bar for promotion and tenure becomes much higher,” said Christiane Spitzmueller, co-author of the paper, organizational psychologist and vice provost for academic affairs and strategy at the University of California, Merced. “The joint evaluation decision-making processes forces [tenure and promotion committees] to carefully calibrate against different cases without letting that criteria shift seep in.”

The findings about joint review’s promise as a vehicle for increasing faculty diversity come at an inflection point for higher education institutions torn between long-standing pledges to recruit and retain more minority faculty members and more recent politicized attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

While Black and Hispanic people make up 31 percent of the national population, they represent 11 percent of faculty members, according to federal data cited in the paper. And that representation decreases with each level of promotion: 13 percent of assistant professors are Black and Hispanic, compared to 11 percent of associate and 8 percent of full professors.

Prior research has attributed those gaps in part to biased review committees, which are predominately composed of white and Asian faculty.

In 2024, many of the same researchers who studied joint review published a paper about the double standard Black and Hispanic faculty face in promotion and tenure decisions. They found that faculty from those groups were 44 percent less likely to receive unanimous recommendation—or “gold standard” review—from collegewide review committees and received 7 percent more negative votes from individual committee members than white or Asian faculty members.

But as Spitzmueller and her co-authors noted in the new paper, common efforts to increase the number of Black and Hispanic faculty—including affirmative action, training aimed at reducing racial bias and race-blind reviews—have proven either “unfeasible” or “ineffective.”

And now, explicit faculty diversity initiatives are increasingly subject to political scrutiny. Over the past year, the federal government has joined many state governments in banning DEI-related efforts across higher education—including those aimed at recruiting and retaining faculty from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups—and accused some universities of abandoning merit-based hiring to fulfill racial quotas.

Joint review, however, is one approach that universities can use to diversify their faculty ranks without courting federal or state scrutiny.

Researchers analyzed 1,804 promotion and tenure decisions (906 joint reviews and 898 separate reviews) between 2015 and 2022 from six anonymous research universities of varying sizes. Located in different geographical areas across the country, the institutions included one Hispanic-serving institution and one historically Black university. Controlling for research productivity, institution, gender, rank, discipline, department size and grant acquisition, Black and Hispanic faculty who were reviewed alongside other candidates received an average of 9 percent fewer negative votes at the department level than those who were evaluated separately.

“If people are so interested in promoting fair and unbiased hiring and promotion, [joint review] is an option,” Spitzmueller said, adding that their data also shows that white job candidates do not face the discrimination some Republican politicians have claimed. “Debiasing training can cause backlash and make people uncomfortable. In our view, changing the decision-making context is much preferable both empirically and theoretically.”

But those results may surprise many academics.

In a survey of 289 professors who have served on promotion and tenure committees that was included in the paper, only 17 percent of faculty expected joint evaluation to improve underrepresented minority faculty outcomes. By contrast, 43 percent expected separate evaluations to improve underrepresented minority faculty outcomes.

At present, the researchers estimate that about half of all professors receive a joint evaluation for promotion and tenure, while the other half receive separate evaluations, the same breakdown reflected in the six universities examined in the study. While some universities—such as those in the University of California system—mandate separate reviews, decisions about review structure are more scattered and arbitrary at others.

“Intuitively, people think separate evaluations may be more fair to minority faculty. There’s some support for that in social psychology—you don’t want to force a comparison between two people and make one seem like an outsider or make their race or gender more salient,” said Theodore Masters-Waage, co-author of the paper and researcher at UC Merced’s Health Science Research Institute. “But what we see in our dataset is the opposite.”