Faculty Recruitment
CalArts’ faculty recruitment policy was established with two goals in mind:
- To ensure an equitable and coherent process across the Institute that emphasizes faculty governance within the process of hiring of new faculty
- To create a faculty search process that examines accepted practice toward recruitment of a more diverse body of faculty that better reflects the diversity of our student population.
CalArts has set diversity, equity and inclusion as priorities institutionally; this work is a powerful way to acknowledge that structural racism and other biases affect academic and artistic professional communities in concrete ways. One of the places that bias has the greatest impact is on recruitment and hiring.
As an Institute, we aim for a faculty that is diverse in all ways: in background, identity, approach and experience.
At the same time we want to point to particular gaps in our institutional practice and community composition; we have particular issues of equity and diversity in terms of racial identity, ethnicity and, in many places, gender identity.
While we can acknowledge race itself as a historical construct, the historical and ongoing impact of this construct on the institution, its members and our policies and practices has real and direct implications for our community of students, staff and faculty. They can be seen directly in our histories of recruiting and retaining faculty of color and other underrepresented groups.