Despite progress in diversifying the nation's student body, systemic barriers impede the recruitment, retention, and advancement of African American, Hispanic American, Native American Indian, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, and Native Pacific Islander faculty. These systemic obstacles limit opportunities for individuals and hinder the innovation and inclusivity of STEM fields. The National Science Foundation Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (NSF AGEP) program addresses these challenges by supporting collaborations that focus on systemic change within academic institutions. Mala Htun, lead PI from the University of New Mexico (UNM)- a Hispanic serving institution and the flagship institution of New Mexico- brought together collaborators from UNM, Arizona State University, and the University of Oregon to form this AGEP Catalyst Alliance (ACA) team.

The goals of the collaboration were to identify institutional challenges, mobilize leader engagement, and develop a strategic plan to address practices and climates that impact the successful participation of all scholars in STEM fields. The team integrated institutional self-assessments, outcomes from the leadership engagement meetings, and research results into a long-term plan to foster organizational change. 

Institutional Challenges. The project began with a comprehensive assessment of graduate student data at all partner institutions. This review highlighted disparities in graduate admissions, retention, and funding, with underrepresented students facing more significant barriers to academic success. Additionally, the data review process allowed the team to identify local barriers at each institution while also understanding which barriers were common among the partner institutions. 

Leader Engagement. The institutional data was shared at the leader engagement meetings. The meetings included cooperative engagement of leaders from the partner institutions. This opportunity allowed leaders to engage in a cross- institutional dialogue on issues related to the barriers within the professoriate and opportunities for diversifying the STEM professoriate. Guided by Dobbin and Kalev's managerial engagement framework, the meetings cultivated buy-in to the team's project goals by involving leaders in the design of the cross- institutional strategic plan.

Factorial Experiment. The outcomes from the campus leadership engagement meetings became the motivation for the factorial research experiment. The ACA team desired to emphasize solutions that addressed the systemic barriers, common to the three institutions. As a result, the team built on the diverse skill sets of the team to develop practical cause-and-effect models of factors driving faculty evaluation. Factorial experiments are widely used in the natural sciences, engineering, and industry to model and manipulate complex systems. Thus, the team decided to conduct a factorial experiment to model faculty success, also considered a complex system. The experiment focused on the determinants of faculty perceptions of research excellence during the tenure and promotion review process. The participants in the study included STEM faculty from the three partner institutions, who completed mock reviews of fictitious yet realistic faculty profiles. Results show that what determines "research success in academia" depends heavily on the discipline and the institution. The data also show that external grant funding, number of publications, and h-index were the most significant contributors to evaluation of overall research excellence, though the relative importance of these factors varies across institution and field of study. The findings reveal that a seemingly quantitative evaluation process is subjective and variable and may therefore reproduce, and not correct for, societal biases and inequalities. Although a targeted set of factors were studied with a focus on STEM disciplines, the tool is valuable to examine evaluation processes with different sets of criteria, across various disciplines, at multiple career-stages.  

Strategic Plan. The team utilized the outcomes from the works described above as a foundation for the five-year equity plan. This plan incorporates evidence-based strategies, including structured mentorship programs and accountability mechanisms, to promote hiring, retention, and advancement of STEM faculty. The programs will continually rely upon the use of the innovative, statistical tool developed during this project. The strategic plan also emphasizes small wins-incremental, visible changes that build momentum for more significant systemic transformations. 

This work has been shared through two presentations at the annual meetings of the American Society for Engineering Education (2023 and 2025.) Additionally, the team is finalizing the research manuscript on the design and findings of the factorial experiment.

Last Modified: 05/28/2025
Modified by: Lizandra C Godwin