We’re thrilled to put on the first installment in a new free webinar series on faculty technology at liberal arts colleges—a joint presentation with the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, covering what they do and how Interfolio helps them do it. Register here to attend the webinar!
The vast majority of Interfolio’s more than 200 clients are accredited colleges and universities, of all sizes and nearly all types, public and private. Among them, you’ll find a sizeable cadre of small liberal arts schools who have been a sort of bedrock throughout the time that Interfolio’s shared governance platform has been up and running.
In addition, there are a few organizations that find our technology valuable despite their falling outside the category of conventional academic institutions. One of these is the Gettysburg College-based Consortium for Faculty Diversity, a group of around four dozen liberal arts colleges across the U.S.
The Consortium takes an admirably concrete approach to aiding faculty diversity initiatives at liberal arts colleges. They offer fellowships that place scholars from underrepresented minority groups in faculty positions at liberal arts colleges. Part of the point of this is to amplify the message that a faculty job at a smaller institution—characteristically more oriented toward teaching than research—is a viable, rewarding, interesting path for a scholar. On the institutional side, it gives a leg up to schools that may have limited resources on their own, or may be more geographically distant from more diverse urban centers.
Joining us for the actual webinar are two representatives of the Consortium: Jack Ryan, Vice Provost and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Gettysburg College, and Bruce King, Assistant to the President for Institutional Diversity at St. Olaf College. We’ll hear from them about how the Consortium has grown to occupy the role it does today, and why they pursued a better system for managing the logistics of their fellowship search process.
Along with around a quarter of its member institutions, the Consortium itself uses Interfolio’s technology to improve their academic decision process—in their case, they use Interfolio’s Faculty Search recruitment platform to manage their pool of fellowship candidates. We’ll say more in the webinar itself about the full toolbox that Interfolio offers to aid faculty diversity goals throughout the recruitment process.
Why a liberal arts series? Basically, Interfolio’s liberal arts clients have played an influential role over the years in our understanding of the priorities and needs of shared governance and the academic committee model. Often having fewer administrative layers between faculty, leadership, and students, our conversations with liberal arts colleges have proven pretty indispensable in terms of seeing clearly what the core benefits of faculty-focused technology should be. It feels worthwhile to bring to the surface some of these schools’ experiences, as new kinds of digital experiences intersect in new ways with traditional (and nontraditional) faculty career models.