The passage of Proposition 2 in 2006 outlawing affirmative action in Michigan resulted last month in a publication on faculty hiring practices that puts the educational needs of students first by emphasizing competency more than diversity.
The “Best Practices for a Successful Academic Search” manual published by the university’s Office for Inclusion in October 2008, specifies that affirmative action criteria still require departments to make good faith efforts to be inclusive about publicizing and recruiting for faculty positions. The new rules mean that faculty search committees can proceed with confidence that hiring decisions will be commanded by disciplinary criteria for selection of the best possible faculty for MSU’s labs and classrooms.
In a communication on Oct. 15, Director Paulette Granberry Russell of the Office for Inclusion explicitly pointed to the “Enlarging the Pool” section of the bulletin on pages 7-9 that gives examples of the kind of good faith recruitment efforts that should be made.
The university has affirmed in this response to Proposition 2’s passage a commitment to faculty hiring that is not distorted by considerations of race, gender or ethnicity. This is exactly what we expect in a nation that just elected Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States of America.
Fred Fico
journalism professor
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