Cluster hiring draws new faculty focused on diversity and inclusion : NewsCenter
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(l to r) Sloan Okrey, Tiffany Steele, and Amanda McLeroy joined the faculty at the Warner School of Education as part of a recent cluster hire, an emerging practice that is gaining traction in higher education. (University of Rochester photo / Stephen Dow)
The success of a recent hiring initiative at the Warner School of Education increases both diversity and interdisciplinary research at Rochester.
Last spring, the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and Human Development embarked on a new approach to faculty hiring, one that has resulted in three new tenure-track faculty members focused on interdisciplinary research around diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). The successful faculty cluster hire—the first of its kind for Rochester—demonstrates how the Warner School is advancing the University’s commitment to diversity and inclusion and institutional strengths in interdisciplinary research.
According to Provost David Figlio, it’s a commitment that brings real value to the institution. “Diversity of thought, diversity of knowledge, and diversity of lived experiences only serve to enhance our research and the educational experiences of our students,” says Figlio, who also holds an appointment in the Warner School and in the Department of Economics. “It’s more than meeting baseline standards for equity and inclusion. It’s about recognizing that truly preparing our graduates for the world and solving some of our society’s most pressing problems can only be done when there is a range of perspectives and a wealth of ideas.”
What is cluster hiring?
Faculty cluster hiring is an emerging practice that is gaining traction in higher education. While cluster hiring takes various forms, it generally involves hiring multiple faculty members for one or more departments based on shared interdisciplinary research goals. This type of faculty search aims to enhance diversity and inclusion by attracting talented candidates who bring impressive research and teaching portfolios around a common theme.
According to a 2015 Faculty Cluster Hiring for Diversity and Institutional Climate study led by the Urban Universities for HEALTH, cluster hiring around an interdisciplinary theme has positively impacted diversity, scholarship, and institutional climate. It has the potential to accelerate institutional excellence by adding diversity to the faculty, improving the success of faculty from all backgrounds, and improving campus climate through interdisciplinary collaboration, enriched teaching and learning environment, and community engagement.
The Warner School designed its cluster hiring effort to diversify faculty, foster interdisciplinary research and collaborations, and enrich graduate students’ experience across the school’s DEIJ theme. An essential piece of the process was building a thematic cluster around a shared research interest that would draw diverse candidates who approach the common theme through a different lens at the Warner School.
“A core strand in advancing Warner’s disciplines of study is found in our social justice mission,” says Warner School Dean Sarah Peyre, who served as the University’s interim provost during the faculty search. “We designed our cluster hiring program in a way that will help us to advance the Warner School’s mission and achieve our research and diversity goals in all aspects of the institution. Looking at equity and social justice as a common theme will continue to move the school forward.”
For the open tenure-track assistant professor faculty positions across the school’s departments, the search committees prioritized candidates committed to interdisciplinary research interests focused on the DEIJ theme. Associate Dean Douglas Guiffrida, who led the cluster hire search as the school’s interim dean, notes that diversifying faculty was equally important.
“We have many faculty across the Warner School who are engaged in impactful equity-based research,” explains Guiffrida, “but in order to truly fulfill our mission and enhance the experiences of our students, we recognized the importance of diversifying our tenure-track faculty. We are bringing in an incredibly talented group of new faculty whose research has the potential to transform educational systems and whose teaching expertise will greatly impact Warner School students.”
Peyre adds, “The future of academia is really about these interdisciplinary connections, looking at the intersections of our field and how they move things forward—how they’ll move our knowledge economy forward, how they will move the University forward. As we identify these intersections that we want to do, having cluster hires to populate the faculty who will be the thought leaders in these spaces will require us to collaborate.”
Cluster hiring also allows a group of new junior faculty to begin their careers at Rochester as part of a cohort, one that can be supported concurrently by the institution. Research has shown that the best way not only to attract but also retain diverse faculty is through this kind of cohort model. In addition, the senior faculty already at the Warner School can come together to mentor and support the incoming group of new faculty, notes Guiffrida.
The new tenure-track faculty hires are
- Amanda McLeroy, an assistant professor in counseling and human development;
- Sloan Okrey, an assistant professor in counseling and human development; and
- Tiffany Steele, an assistant professor in educational leadership.
Each new faculty member brings a different type of experience and research focus to the Warner School, all with the same ultimate goal—to lead research on diversity, equity, and inclusion in education, counseling and human development, including equity-oriented scholarship that addresses the effects of racism or discrimination and oppression in underrepresented communities.
Amanda McLeroy (University of Rochester photo / Stephen Dow)
Black youths’ experiences of trauma on social media
Amanda McLeroy’s research focuses on the overall mental health of college students, particularly Black college students. Her dissertation concerned Black youths’ experiences with social media exposure to police brutality.
“Social media brings a whole new layer that allows adolescents to feel or experience the same amount of trauma as someone who was there, so it’s this vicarious exposure that impacts them,” says McLeroy, who holds a PhD in rehabilitation counseling and rehabilitation counselor education from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. “Social media is a prominent part of adolescents’ lives. Understanding how their perception and exposure to police brutality impacts them will be important, so I hope to expand on this work in Rochester.”
As part of her dissertation, she used a measurement tool that she developed to capture the frequency and context of media exposure—such as how often students were exposed to images, videos, memes, and GoFundMe efforts—as well as how algorithms impact students’ exposure to such messages. The tool, called the Police Brutality Exposure on Social Media scale, uses a Likert scale, a psychometric scale to measure adolescents’ attitudes, knowledge, perceptions, values, and behavioral changes, to look at adolescents’ experiences of police brutality via social media.
McLeroy has found a common theme in her studies: students are high social media users—that is, they use it frequently and access multiple sites often—and they are exposed to police brutality at high rates. She plans to expand her scale to different underserved and underrepresented populations to see how the findings translate across different demographics.
“I want to look at high school and middle school students, elders and older adults, individuals with disabilities, and those from both low- and high-socioeconomic status households, because social media affects all of us,” she says. “But adolescents are in this prime developmental phase, and they are who my research will focus on initially.”
McLeroy brings a wide range of clinical counseling experiences to Rochester, having worked with clients in educational and community-based settings, correctional facilities, and private practice. Seeing and nurturing the development of her clients and spending time with them has always been pivotal to her counseling work.
“People say that getting a job you love won’t feel like a job. I didn’t believe them until I got into counseling,” says McLeroy. “I know this is where I belong because of the change I see within the clients and the students I work with and that I am still connected to.”
Sloan Okrey (University of Rochester photo / Stephen Dow)
LGBTQ identity formation in religious communities
Sloan Okrey, who uses they/them pronouns, is an interdisciplinary scholar with a clinical background in social work and a doctorate in human development from the University of Minnesota. Both have intertwined throughout Okrey’s trajectory in academia, where they have studied the family and community context of religious (specifically, conservative Christian) families and communities in the United States, and how LGBTQ people experience that context.
Before Okrey’s doctoral work, they were a social worker in an LGBTQ resource center at a nonprofit in Illinois where they supported LGBTQ people—many of whom had experienced religion-based rejection from family. In that role, Okrey learned that while there was research looking at the personal experiences of LGBTQ people navigating their conflicts about their faith, there was a significant gap in the research incorporating the family context.
“At the time, I had a faculty mentor in my clinical space who told me, ‘if the research does not exist, you’re not going to be able to run and fund the programs that you want to run,’ and that I should consider doing the research myself,” says Okrey, who wanted to develop resources for the LGBTQ community but lacked the research and support to do so. They ended up taking a summer job working in a research lab at the University of Illinois, doing data entry on an LGBTQ research dataset. “I just fell in love with the process—the work, the potential, the lab meetings—all of it. I just got excited about the research elements of it, and I haven’t lost that enthusiasm since,” they say.
Research in this area has focused on the point of disclosure and reactions to disclosure—how parents respond and how relationships change in the first few weeks after “coming out.” Yet Okrey set out to understand how a religiously anti-LGBTQ family environment might affect LGBTQ youth during the many years before identity disclosure—and what happens to relationships over time when families are not able to change their religious beliefs on the issue of LGBTQ identity.
“Unless they’re able to deconstruct their beliefs that they hold that LGBTQ identity is disordered, immoral, or against their beliefs and make new meanings for themselves, their parent-child relationships will deteriorate or become less close over time,” Okrey says. “Even if they maintain their relationships, those relationships often become more emotionally distant because of that missing element of meaningful affirmation. That’s the data that I’m working on right now.”
“When institutions are willing to do cluster hires, it says something about how they value early-career faculty.”
As for the next step in Rochester, they want to carry out research that, at the very least, has a translational component so that the work is accessible to those who need it in the field. Part of that, Okrey says, is making connections with the LGBTQ community—those who need to access the research, as Okrey did years ago.
“I have an interest in really investing in what the LGBTQ community is doing here in Rochester,” says Okrey. “One of my goals is to interface with the LGBTQ youth who are already doing work and get their perspectives on the next steps in terms of looking at affirmations from families. I don’t want to just run off my ideas and conclusions from my scholarship; rather, I want to ensure that I work with the people most impacted by the question.”
Okrey’s dissertation was a mixed-methods study of LGBTQ adults and their siblings, of which one-third were from African Americans families. “There are these really rich and in-depth descriptions from participants about family dynamics and church dynamics, and navigating that from these ten different African American families,” says Okrey. “There’s so much in there that deserves analysis. I’m hoping to collaborate with other scholars across campus who are studying African American families specifically.”
In acknowledging the value of the cluster hiring structure, Okrey suggests it has the potential to create a sense of belonging and community, especially for marginalized and underrepresented groups. It is a way, they say, to alleviate some of the pressure of entry into the higher education space that may be experienced through the traditional approach of hiring faculty.
Okrey adds, “I think that when institutions are willing to do cluster hires, it says something about how they value early-career faculty because they are not afraid to hand them a larger amount of institutional power. Bringing in multiple first-year faculty at the same time and encouraging them to talk to each other and build community together—it undercuts a lot of that institutional power.”
Tiffany Steele (University of Rochester photo / Stephen Dow)
Improving support for minoritized students in higher education
Tiffany Steele’s research centers on the lived experiences of Black girls and women in education, specifically their transition from high school to college, and their identity formation. She aligns her work with improving support for Black girls and women as they move through their educational trajectories. As part of that transition from the K–12 to the higher education space, she’s also thinking about how to start bridging that gap—not just institutionally within schools, but also with regard to the literature and the knowledge about the transition and that transitional experience.
“The research that we have about Black girls talks about how they usually have more elevated levels of discipline infractions in schools because of the way authority figures perceive them,” says Steele. She attributes various external and internal factors contributing to the adultification of Black girls, or how Black girls are viewed as older than they are, which ultimately affects their transition through educational spaces. “The way that the educational system is set up, it turns into the student’s problem: the student is now the issue versus focusing on the institutional structures that allow people to enter these spaces prepared to teach all children.”
Steele’s personal experience as a young girl attending public schools in Detroit, Michigan, informed her dissertation. “I was one of those Black girls in school. I didn’t think I was being rude, but next thing I knew, I was in detention,” she says, “when in fact, I was just trying to answer the question or I had an urgent need.”
That personal experience in high school influenced how Steele, like many others, navigated her first semester of college at the University of Michigan—and eventually sparked her research interests in graduate school. There, she turned her attention to the college access and retention of minoritized students, with an emphasis on the lived experiences of Black girls and women, at predominantly White institutions. She’s interested in examining how adults can give Black girls early on the permission and the tools to self-define. That way, when they arrive at these collegiate spaces, they come healthy and have access to resources and support to navigate and work through the higher education realm.
“What I’ve learned, and I’m still working on publishing, is this idea that higher education espouses many values about what students need to be successful in college, and institutions often market it as a one-size-fits-all approach,” Steele says. “Rather, they need to look beyond this general idea of how they are measuring success for their own institutional needs to include engaged students, specifically students of color and Black girls, in that definition of what success means for them, what educational trajectories look like for them, and the options that they have. They also should consider how these students can fully show up as their authentic selves without judgment, without the worry of safety, and without fear of reprimand for just showing up in a way that’s outside the traditional norm.”
Before coming to Rochester, Steele was an assistant professor in the higher education department at Oakland University in Michigan for two years. It was her first faculty position after receiving her PhD in higher education and student affairs from The Ohio State University.
Steele says the Rochester cluster hiring process felt more intentional than what she had experienced on the job market two years ago. “There was a lot of extra intentionality and thoughtfulness that I was like, ‘This feels like it’s unheard of typically in higher education. This is a special kind of situation, so let me pay more attention to the ways they are showing up for me now before I say yes,’” she recalls.
How cluster hiring can foster connections across the institution
McLeroy, Okrey, and Steele are looking forward to the prospect of collaborating with fellow faculty and researchers at the Warner School as well as across the University as a whole.
Coming to Rochester, McLeroy hopes, will allow her to eventually build a training program for counselors—college counselors, faculty, and school counselors—to help them better treat and work with those exposed directly and vicariously to police brutality and other forms of racial and childhood trauma.
McLeroy has already received helpful feedback and ideas from her new Rochester colleagues on moving her research forward. She says this allows her to envision potential opportunities for interdisciplinary research and collaborations that explore various forms of trauma and multicultural issues affecting underserved and underrepresented populations. As McLeroy looks to build institution-wide connections, she’s also hoping to connect with the staff of the University’s EPO partnership with East High School.
The University’s research enterprise, with its breadth and depth across departments and units, including the Medical Center and as well as the Mt. Hope Family Center, Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, Susan B. Anthony Center, and the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, offers both McLeroy and Okrey opportunities for fruitful partnerships beyond the Warner School’s counseling and human development department.
Okrey came to Rochester ready to hit the ground running, and they are already collaborating with scholars across campus, including the University’s psychology department.
“The potential for future collaborations and appointments with the Frederick Douglass Institute and Susan B. Anthony Center on interdisciplinary scholarship spoke to my interests in diversity and diverse populations of research,” they say, referring to the part of the faculty position description that captured Okrey’s interest in coming to Rochester.
The cohort’s cluster structure—centered on DEIJ and focused on interdisciplinary research—encourages Steele as she looks to expand upon her research through partnerships. One area of interest for Steele is exploring how Black girls navigate religious spaces and how institutions can provide resources that enhance that faith-based grounding to help them complete their academic degrees. She also hopes to engage with East High students in self-identity conversations early on to help them think about college and educational trajectories accessible to them. Eventually, Steele yearns to be part of a faculty-led study abroad program at Rochester that lets students explore DEIJ issues globally.
“I’m excited about the idea of collaboration, and not collaboration from the space that I have to make my research fit, but from the standpoint that people are genuinely excited about my research,” Steele says.
The Warner School took advantage of another appointment during the cluster hiring process: Zachary Brown was hired as a postdoctoral researcher with joint appointments at the Warner School and the Frederick Douglass Institute. Additionally, the Warner School deepens its faculty ranks this year with two new faculty members outside the cluster hire initiative and the promotion of four existing educators based on their research and scholarly contributions.
Across the University’s campuses, other units—including the Medical Center and the Eastman School of Music—have been proactively hiring faculty members with diversity and inclusion in mind, albeit not necessarily through a formal cluster hiring process.
Peyre is hopeful that the Warner School’s approach could serve as a valuable model for other schools and units trying to diversify the faculty pool.
“Our success is built on the vision of our leadership team in applying the best practices for hiring faculty, but doing it in parallel with intentional connection,” adds Peyre. “I know my colleague deans value and are committed to broadening candidate pools and diversifying faculty. The lessons learned during the cluster hiring process can help others implement similar hiring strategies that draw scholars from diverse academic backgrounds to work collaboratively on interdisciplinary problems and emerging research themes.”
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