Ohio State aspires to be a richly diverse community — diverse in all ways, including gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, culture, nationality and, of course, academic disciplines.
With a broad range of talent, we get to the essence of inclusive excellence: diversity of thought, diversity of ideas, diversity of opinions, diversity of perspectives, and diversity of scholarly approaches. This results in a more intelligent, creative, and global approach to everything we do in which we all benefit.
We have not yet reached the level of diversity that we would expect for a research university of our caliber, breadth, and scope. Given this, the focus on new faculty hires for the Discovery Themes initiatives is an ideal opportunity to increase faculty diversity that we must take advantage of.
President Drake shared his support for these efforts in his 2014 address to the University Senate, “The provost and I recently met with the President and Provost Council on Women, and we shared our steadfast commitment to improving the search and selection process to promote diversity, broadly defined. This commitment will be evident throughout our Discovery Theme recruitment, and we look forward to great success.”
The resources on these web pages are best practices for search committees to increase the diversity of candidate pools and mitigate implicit biases that often deter the selection of diverse candidates. With the help of search committee members, the president, provost, and Office of Academic Affairs are working to incorporate these recommendations into the fabric of our search processes.
As we put these practices into place, we’ll learn what works best and fine-tune them as needed. Therefore, please return to this site periodically for updates and improvements.