The Marsal Family School of Education receives the 2023-2024 Rhetaugh G. Dumas Progress in Diversifying Award
The Marsal Family School of Education is the 2024 Rhetaugh G. Dumas Progress in Diversifying Award recipient. The award, which is presented by CEW+ and the Academic Women’s Caucus, recognizes a demonstrated vision, commitment, and dedication to achieve a truly diverse faculty.
Marsal Education is proud to be a leader in the campus-wide initiative promoting Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DEI). The Marsal Education community added “Justice” to these values to underscore the role of educators in the creation of just societies. Through research, public scholarship, community building, and the preparation of education practitioners and policymakers, the Marsal School articulates and advances their dije agenda.
As part of the school’s efforts to attract and retain a highly qualified and robustly diverse community, Marsal Education developed and implemented principles and practices aimed at cultivating broad and inclusive applicant pools for faculty searches to increase all forms of diversity among the faculty.
Initially developed in 2014 and continuously improved, Marsal Education’s Principles, Practices, and Procedures for Faculty Searches and Campus Visits to Support Diversity and Equity Goals include strategies such as developing an internal handbook with guidelines accessible to all faculty, staff, and students; instituting an equity advisor model in which the Education Diversity Advisory Committee and Associate Dean for dije are consulted throughout the search; considering skills, expertise, and experience in advancing dije in decision-making around search committee composition; and requiring all committee members to complete ADVANCE’s STRIDE training within the past 3 years. Marsal Education has partnered with the ADVANCE team that develops STRIDE training to share knowledge about implementing ADVANCE recommendations.
By implementing the full set of processes we have built a more diverse faculty in Marsal Education, yielding an approximate increase of 8 percentage points in underrepresented minority (URM) faculty over the past five years. The percentage of racially minoritized clinical or tenure-track faculty is currently at its highest in the school’s history (39% BIPOC; 32% URM; 23% Black). Per the ADVANCE faculty diversity dashboard, our current numbers exceed the representation at comparable units across U-M such as all professional schools (16% URM) and LSA’s Social Sciences division (21% URM) as well as the overall figure for U-M as a whole (11% URM).
As important as recruitment, the school has prioritized faculty retention by taking action to improve the climate and culture to be a more inclusive, just, and equitable work environment. This includes enhancing structures and support for faculty development, conducting an ADVANCE salary equity analysis, and accounting for the invisible labor of BIPOC faculty/URM faculty members.
The Marsal Family School of Education proudly receives the 2024 Rhetaugh G. Dumas Progress in Diversifying Award in recognition of the sustainable, systemic infrastructures within the school around recruiting, retaining, and supporting a faculty that represents the diversity of our society in multiple ways.