Approved by AHA Council June 2007; updated January 2025. These guidelines supersede previous versions and the AHA’s Statement on Diversity and Affirmative Action (1996).
The American Historical Association is committed to diversity in the historical discipline and recognizes the need for institutions to recruit aggressively and hire members from historically marginalized groups who have been discriminated against. Diversification has added to the richness of historical inquiry, and the discipline as a whole would be diminished without it. Diversity helps institutions achieve their educational and scholarly goals. Therefore, we continue to support initiatives for diversity and inclusion.
Note on terms: Success in recruiting, hiring, and retaining historians from diverse backgrounds and creating inclusive academic environments requires work on many fronts. The following guidelines focus on people from historically marginalized groups with diverse identities, including but not limited to the categories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Arab, and Asian who face the impact of intersectional forms of discrimination and systematic oppression, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. The term “minoritized” rather than “minority” is used to highlight that the situation of these historically marginalized groups is the product of historical processes of dispossession and exclusion, not a chosen or immanent condition.
These guidelines are intended to inform the decisions and practices of deans, department chairs, and senior administrators in universities and colleges and to provide a resource for all historians. The bulleted items are intended to suggest examples and prompts to action and are not meant to be an exhaustive list.
The AHA offers these recommendations and guidance with an invitation to ongoing dialogue and learning together to address concerns based on the diverse perspectives, experiences, and needs of historians who may identify as and/or be identified by others as people from historically marginalized groups. It is essential that all scholars and communities work together toward racial and ethnic equity in the historical discipline.
- Recruitment and Hiring
In keeping with the AHA’s long-standing principles concerning groups that have been historically discriminated against, the Association contends that for the discipline to sustain its intellectual relevance and vitality, and to appeal to students in an increasingly diverse society, the composition of history departments must reflect the demographics of the country. The AHA recommends appropriate long-term strategies to address this challenge.
Students who are members of historically underrepresented groups should constitute a steadily increasing percentage of the students entering graduate history programs and earning PhDs. Talented undergraduates of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds must be encouraged to pursue a range of careers as historians and should receive sustained support throughout their doctoral studies and beyond. The AHA urges institutions to learn from programs that have had success in the steady hiring and retention of historians and other professionals from diverse and historically marginalized groups to tenured and tenure track positions.
Increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of a history department’s faculty requires special efforts when hiring new members, and before and after such processes, to ensure an environment of belonging and equity. Search committees should actively encourage and fully consider applicants from a wide range of backgrounds, and they should also recognize that reliance on informal professional ties to find out about applicants may hurt applicants from diverse groups who have been historically marginalized and discriminated against.
History departments and programs need to focus on building diverse recruiting networks before hiring searches begin, and maintain these relationships during an active search. Building and maintaining professional relationships with historians and students of diverse backgrounds at the undergraduate and graduate level is essential. This support may include encouraging students to seek out networking opportunities at conferences and providing opportunities for them to share their research and work. Departments and programs should consider the curricular interests these students have, regardless of whether the department’s institution is a designated “minority serving institution.” All institutions need to serve communities that have faced racial injustices, systematic oppression, inequities, and disparities.
Department chairs can promote equity in faculty hiring by:
- Ensuring that all search committees consider applicants from underrepresented and historically marginalized groups at each stage of a search and build relationships with diverse scholars and their communities before a search is launched.
- Including in each search committee an equity or diversity coordinator whose primary responsibility is guaranteeing that the search committee takes all practicable measures to increase the number of applicants from diverse backgrounds, including historically marginalized groups. This responsibility should include consulting with the college or university officials concerned with diversity, access, and opportunity in academic hiring.
- Asking senior historians to recommend suitable candidates from their communities.
- Searching for suitable candidates among diverse populations and not only in traditional history programs but also in interdisciplinary programs such as American studies, ethnic studies, and area studies programs.
- Using family/partner and “target-of-opportunity” hires to recruit applicants, supporting their families and sense of belonging.
- Sending job advertisements directly to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Native American–serving institutions, and minority-serving institutions (MSIs) with doctoral programs.
- Using specialized academic listservs to target and inform these candidates of job openings.
- Departmental Climate
Deans, departmental chairs, and senior administrators should take a positive and proactive approach to create an inclusive campus climate that accepts and promotes racial and ethnic equity. They must nurture a positive atmosphere so faculty feel supported and included in the academic workplace. Unprofessional language should not be tolerated in any form. Departments should be collegial, sociable, and open, and their decisions should be transparent.
Department chairs should consider drafting land acknowledgment statements in conversation with Indigenous stakeholders inside and outside the institution. They should be mindful to avoid the pitfalls of such measures to ensure the benefits of combating the erasure of Indigenous histories and peoples, including students, faculty, and staff on campus. In doing so, such action can stimulate long-term commitments to Indigenous communities. Reaching out in this way to create relationships can highlight the presence of Indigenous peoples, the importance of their histories, and work to create a positive multiracial departmental climate.
Department chairs should develop a strategy to recruit, promote, and retain diverse faculty. Standards for hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion should be clearly stated and equitable with regard to race and ethnicity. Departments should promote a climate of diversity that supports faculty, staff, and students.
Department chairs can achieve this by:
- Insisting that service assignments within the department are equitable and that neither race nor ethnicity is a factor in determining service.
- Allocating departmental resources (travel, teaching loads, etc.) equitably.
- Ensuring that the department values university-wide service.
- Understanding that even though service demands usually increase after a faculty member is tenured, the responsibilities of all faculty should be equitable across the unit.
- Drawing up clear and transparent guidelines for tenure and promotion that reflect diverse paths to reappointment and promotion within the academy, in light of the unique circumstances faced by faculty from historically marginalized groups.
- Judging peer-reviewed history, area studies, ethnic studies, and other interdisciplinary journals in tenure and promotion cases equitably.
- Recommending committee assignments that fulfill tenure and promotion expectations. For example, in some schools, service on university-wide committees may be important to getting tenure, but in others, such service may be viewed as a distraction from the work of publishing in refereed scholarly publications.
- Ensuring equitable mentoring responsibilities by holding the entire department responsible for advising students of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and identities rather than placing this duty solely on faculty members of similar backgrounds.
- Recognizing that service may matter more to certain communities that are underrepresented, causing more demands on their time and attention, by appropriately considering the expectations for tenure and promotion and other work evaluations that reflect these values.
- Providing graduate students with equitable resources to access institutional knowledge on funding, grants, and career opportunities.
- Teaching Duties
Deans, department chairs, and senior administrators should ensure that the teaching obligations of faculty from historically underrepresented groups are equitable and comparable to those of other faculty of the same rank. Faculty of diverse backgrounds or identities should teach courses in their areas of specialization, which may not necessarily deal with issues of race and ethnicity. Chairs and faculty colleagues should assign formal advising duties equitably according to rank and number of students. Departments should not assume that faculty from historically underrepresented groups be solely responsible for advising students with similar backgrounds. It would create an unreasonable and unfair burden that might damage their careers and impede their professional development.
Accordingly, department chairs can work to achieve equity by:
- Ensuring that the teaching responsibilities of racially and ethnically underrepresented faculty are reasonable and comparable to those of their departmental colleagues.
- Not expecting faculty to teach courses outside their areas of specialization.
- Being aware and sensitive to the distinctive classroom dynamics that faculty from historically marginalized groups often face.
- Organizing and cosponsoring workshops for new faculty to enable discussion and sharing resources about issues they may face in the classroom in tandem with groups on campus with the requisite expertise.
- Recognizing that the department as a whole, and not just faculty from underrepresented or historically marginalized groups, are responsible for advising students of all backgrounds.
- Opening dialogical processes to ensure that new faculty are both aware of and allowed to help shape the criteria that will be used in reviews of their teaching.
- Mentoring
Effective mentoring can contribute significantly to the professional development of faculty. Department chairs and senior administrators should ensure that faculty receive formal and informal mentoring upon joining the institution. Accordingly, chairs and administrators should try to discern and correct any circumstances that keep new faculty of diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds from receiving the guidance of senior faculty in or outside of the department. Department chairs and administrators should utilize institutional and/or external resources to train senior faculty to mentor junior faculty, specifically, underrepresented racial and ethnic early career faculty. They might also consider incentivizing such service to attract senior faculty in these roles. Effective mentoring can improve the departmental climate by nurturing collegiality, demonstrating the department’s intentions and actions to promote and retain racially and ethnically diverse faculty, and signaling the importance of scholarly productivity and teaching for promotion.
Effective mentoring may include:
- Ensuring chairs and senior administrators familiarize all faculty with the processes associated with promotion, salary reviews, and merit increases.
- Identifying senior department and nondepartment faculty who can serve as informal mentors offering guidance and insight into the institution’s processes and culture at the assistant and associate professor rank.
- Formally assigning designated mentors for all junior faculty with their input.
- Encouraging all newly hired faculty to take advantage of faculty development resources such as teaching and learning programs to develop a community of faculty colleagues early on.
- Providing ample opportunities for new faculty to present their research to help with finding publishers and applying for grants and fellowships.
- Understanding that historians with diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds or identities may mentor faculty with similar backgrounds from departments other than history, requiring far great time commitments than other faculty. This work should not be overlooked as a significant service contribution for promotion and tenure.
- Community Engagement
Faculty members often serve on- and off-campus communities that reflect their different academic and cultural backgrounds. Many of these faculty members not only respond to the needs of local, off-campus community groups, but also dedicate much effort to developing relationships outside their departments with colleagues, staff, or students with similar racial or ethnic backgrounds.
It is important in considerations for tenure and promotion that deans, department chairs, and senior administrators recognize that racial and ethnic underrepresented faculty members are often called to contribute to the nurturing and sustaining of communities as part of their research and teaching, and not exclusively service.
This engagement with a broader community should be affirmed, even though it may often take underrepresented faculty away from the department. Colleges and universities are making increasing institutional commitments to civic and community engagement. Deans, department chairs, and senior administrators should recognize the special role of such faculty in this regard.
Department chairs can recognize the importance of community engagement by:
- Affirming the importance of creating and sustaining diverse campus racial and ethnic communities as part of the department’s and the institution’s efforts to achieve diversity and excellence for all.
- Acknowledging that faculty may want to be involved in a wider community outside the university.
- Recognizing that communities outside the university may have expectations about sustained engagement and trust that require the regular involvement and unique expertise of racially and ethnically underrepresented faculty.
- Counting public scholarship that deals with such communities toward tenure, promotion, and reward as recommended in the AHA’s Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship.
- Considering a racial and ethnic underrepresented historian’s service to a particular community outside the university as fulfilling service requirements for tenure and promotion.
- Professional Development
An important part of the graduate mentoring process is helping students prepare for careers after graduation. Department chairs and faculty should acquaint themselves with the various career options available to students working on advanced degrees in history and discuss them with all students. Faculty also should be sensitive to students’ ambitions and obligations and offer straightforward and candid advice. Mentoring these students need not end at graduation. We encourage faculty to provide ongoing professional support.
Departmental chairs and other faculty should encourage graduates to consider applying to any job relevant to their interests and qualifications. These employment opportunities include a wide variety of venues where historians are and can be employed, including museums, government agencies, and private industry. For those interested in careers in postsecondary education, this could include research universities, four-year colleges, HBCUs, tribal colleges, MSIs, and community colleges. Outside of the formal education sector, this could include museums, libraries, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, cultural institutions, and many diverse entities that benefit from hiring historians.
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