Donald Vardaman

Recruitment and Diversification of Higher Education Faculty: Knight V. Alabama's Impact on Faculty Hiring in Alabama?s Public Universities and Faculty Recruitment Best Practices Donald Vardaman

This book examines the impact of the Knight v. Alabama (1991) Remedial Decree on faculty hiring within Alabama?s public universities and examines successful and unsuccessful faculty recruiting practices. Data were collected through surveys of the 16 public universities within the state of Alabama, a review of court documents and reports from those universities, and interviews with deans and department chairs in two regional, one medical, and one historically Black university affected by the remedial decree. Some of the author's findings include: (a) remedial and consent decrees seeking to diversify higher education faculty membership should provide a core set of recruiting and hiring steps, (b) the most successful faculty recruitment techniques contain some form of personal contact, (c) national advertisement of faculty vacancies is often done with little forethought in regard to the probable success of the advertisement, (d) low salaries are consistently considered a serious obstacle to attracting the most qualified candidates.