On Sept. 7, NYU Abu Dhabi officially welcomed its new cohort of 45 faculty members and academic leaders, among them Arlie Petters as Provost.

“When we heard about the new hires, we were definitely excited,” said Amna Hassan, Class of 2021 and the chair of the Student Government Diversity Committee. “Forty-five faculty members is a huge thing.”

Her sentiment is well received: with the addition of the recent cohort, NYUAD now boasts over 300 faculty members — standing, visiting, affiliate included — hailing from more than 45 nationalities.

But how are our faculty really hired? And how do institutional goals of diversity, inclusion and equity play into that process? The Gazelle sat down with Kirsten Edepli, Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity, to better understand this process.

Edepli’s office reports directly to the Office of the Provost and is involved, in different capacities, in the multitiered, multiyear process of academic hiring.

Traditionally, academic hiring is done by reaching out to potential candidates through networks of existing standing faculty and the search committees created for this purpose. The search committees conduct a few rounds of interviews, holistically assess the candidates and share an unranked list of potential candidates with the Dean of the concerned discipline. The Dean reviews the findings and shares their recommendation with the Provost, who officially extends an offer to the candidate. While this is dependent on the university’s strategic plan for diversity, equity and inclusion, it is also partly influenced by each department’s specific goals.

The Office of Faculty Development and Diversity is responsible for supporting the work of the departments and search committees, which includes providing training on mitigating bias and consulting the committees to broaden their search.

Achieving gender parity across all divisions is an important goal for the institution. “We want to make sure we have a representation of demographics, for example, gender. We should be at gender parity,” she emphasized. “That’s something that has really been a focus for the search committees.”

However, addressing these concerns isn’t as simple as increasing the level of outreach, because there are issues in the academic pipeline itself.

“The pipeline is the number of people coming out of PhD programs, because to be a faculty member across disciplines, you need to have a PhD. Women are underrepresented in some disciplines, in the PhD sector, and some of them who do get a PhD are not interested in going into academia,” shared Edepli.

Despite these challenges, the recent cohort has successfully increased the number of women in senior faculty positions: two of the faculty coming in with tenure are women.

An article published in The Gazelle in June highlighted the severe lack of Black professors at NYUAD: only eight out of 260 of the current entire academic faculty was Black. This was later followed by a statement from Vice Chancellor Mariet Westermann to the community.

“I therefore commit to … enhance our efforts to increase the presence of our faculty of scholars from underrepresented communities, and especially Black faculty of African, African American, and Caribbean heritage and other faculty of color,” the communication read.

Edepli explained that it is a very clear, strategic goal for the university to hire more Black faculty and that enhanced recruiting methods have been adopted to meet these goals.

“We enable our search committees to have the tools that they need to reach out to applicants or potential candidates in talent pools that may not be in their own networks,” Edepli explained. “To match the statement made by Mariet, there are societies, journals, academic groups that are for Black faculty, faculty of color, Black women engineers, Black women who code; there are many many of these. We have assembled a very extensive database that we can then use to send out those ads.”

Hassan further reflected on the importance of meaningful diversity among faculty and academic leadership. “In academia, it’s very important for us as students to see people who look like us, in professions that we want to be in; that allows us to aspire to be like them,” she explained.

Edepli shares the same commitment. “Our goal is really to diversify our pools, which was a very, very strong focus, this year, last year,” she elaborated. “I am hopeful that when we put that same focus on diversity, the goal of hiring faculty of colour, Black identifying faculty, faculty from the Global South, UAE nationals, those will all be areas that are in the strategic plan for each search.”

One of the main ways of operationalizing an institution’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is by looking at demographic reports released publicly by the institution. While NYUAD’s commitment to representativeness and enhancing diversity is reflected in its strategic goals for faculty recruitment, no such document otherwise has been made public.

For Edepli, releasing statistics on faculty representation is one point of focus for her office; however, quantifying diversity isn’t as simple as it may seem. “I think we can collect things that fall into a number or a pie chart, but the kind of complexity at NYUAD is completely different from, say, that of NYU … So, we’re working on that,” she concluded.

Lastly, NYUAD has set a precedent for student agency in selecting academic leaders by conducting listening sessions while searching for a new Vice Chancellor in 2018 and Provost in 2020. Since all searches are advertised publicly, Edepli encourages students to reach out to scholars they believe would enjoy the NYUAD experience and ask them to apply.

“That said, we are mandated to hire in the areas that we have said that we strategically want to hire,” Edepli explained. There are also other mechanisms for students to voice their concerns, ranging from Program Heads and Deans to Student Government’s Diversity Committee and Academic Committees.

As NYUAD heads into its second decade of existence, it is looking to build on its standing faculty, which is already over 250 individuals strong. The new faculty cohort makes important strides in NYUAD’s commitment towards diversity and inclusion and the hope is to sustain and expand these efforts for the future.