Black and Hispanic faculty members seeking promotion at research universities face career-damaging biases, with their scholarly production judged more harshly than that of their peers, according to an initiative co-led by the University of California, Merced that aims to uncover the roots of these biases and develop strategies for change.

Junior professors are generally evaluated and voted on for promotion and tenure by committees comprising senior colleagues. In one of the studies conducted by the research team, results suggest that faculty from underrepresented minorities received 7% more negative votes from committees than their non-minority peers. Further, minority faculty were 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes of approval. The judgment of women minority faculty was particularly harsh.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, are part of a research program co-led by the University of Houston. The program began four years ago to identify bias in academic evaluations. Current research focuses on understanding what drives the biases and developing policies to mitigate them.

The development of a Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement is being led by UC Merced psychology Professor Christiane Spitzmueller, a member of the university’s Health Sciences Research Institute and a lead investigator for the research initiative.

The initiative underscores and partially explains the lack of faculty from underrepresented minorities on U.S. campuses. Blacks and Hispanics account for only 14% of the nation’s assistant professors and 8% of its full professors, while those minorities make up 30% of the U.S. population.

This lack of representation not only hinders professional academics but impacts minority students, who look to faculty members for inspiration and mentoring. Learning from Black and Hispanic professors increases students’ likelihood of pursuing STEM careers or simply remaining on academic paths.

Faculty members’ ability to rise through the ranks and receive tenure—an earned guarantee of continued employment—is important not just for the recipients but for the universities, Spitzmueller said.

“Tenure is crucial for faculty, allowing them the freedom to explore innovative and sometimes controversial research without fear of repercussion,” Spitzmueller said. “It is vital that we rethink how tenure is awarded to ensure equity in the academic system.”

The initiative’s other lead investigators are Professor Juan Madera and Associate Provost Ericka Henderson of the University of Houston and Michelle Penn-Marshall, vice president for research and innovation at Texas Southern University. The initiative leverages the research strength of not just UC Merced, Houston and Texas Southern, but also Texas A&M University, Louisiana State University, Purdue University and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Prior studies have shown that faculty from minority backgrounds continue to face barriers in peer-review and grant-funding processes. The research initiative builds on that knowledge, highlighting how these challenges lead to biased promotion and tenure decisions that can dramatically alter a scholar’s career trajectory.

The team analyzed promotion and tenure decisions for 1,571 faculty members at five universities from 2015–2022. The data included promotion and tenure committee votes along with linguistic analysis of external review letters—an evaluation by an outside scholar of a candidate’s research, teaching and service. The letters are a key part of the evaluation process. The analysis accounted for differences in candidate assessment from campus to campus.

Analysis results challenge assumptions that the lack of minorities among full professors is caused by factors such as a toxic campus atmosphere, social isolation or a lack of professional support. The research initiative suggests the promotion and tenure decision process is in dire need of policies and training that can reduce bias and promote equity.

Daron Acemoglu wants to make clear right away that he has nothing against artificial intelligence. He gets the potential. “I’m not an AI pessimist,” he declares seconds into an interview.

What makes Acemoglu, a renowned professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, come off as a doomsayer locked in on the mounting economic and financial perils ahead, is the unrelenting hype around the technology and the way it’s fueling an investment boom and furious tech stock rally.

As promising as AI may be, there’s little chance it will live up to that hype, Acemoglu says. By his calculation, only a small percentage of all jobs—a mere 5%—is ripe to be taken over, or at least heavily aided, by AI over the next decade. Good news for workers, true, but very bad for the companies sinking billions into the technology expecting it to drive a surge in productivity.

“A lot of money is going to get wasted,” says Acemoglu. “You’re not going to get an economic revolution out of that 5%.”

Acemoglu has become one of the louder, and more high-profile, voices warning that the AI frenzy on Wall Street and in C-suites across America has gone too far. An Institute Professor, the highest title for faculty at MIT, Acemoglu first made a name for himself beyond academic circles a decade ago when he co-authored “Why Nations Fail,” a New York Times bestselling book.

AI, and the advent of new technologies, more broadly, have figured prominently in his economics work for years.

The bulls argue that AI will allow businesses to automate a big chunk of work tasks and spark a new era of medical and scientific breakthroughs as the technology keeps improving.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a company whose very name has become synonymous with the AI boom, has projected that rising demand for the technology’s services from a broader range of companies and governments will require as much as $1 trillion in spending to upgrade data center equipment in coming years.

Skepticism about these sorts of claims has started to mount—in part because investments in AI have driven up costs much faster than revenue at companies like Microsoft and Amazon—but most investors remain willing to pay lofty premiums for stocks poised to ride the AI wave.

Acemoglu envisions three ways the AI story could play out in coming years.

The first—and by far most benign—scenario calls for the hype to slowly cool and investments in “modest” uses of the technology to take hold.

In the second scenario, the frenzy builds for another year or so, leading to a tech stock crash that leaves investors, executives and students disillusioned with the technology. “AI spring followed by AI winter,” he calls this one.

The third—and scariest—scenario is that the mania goes unchecked for years, leading companies to cut scores of jobs and pump hundreds of billions of dollars into AI “without understanding what they’re going to do with it,” only to be left scrambling to try to rehire workers when the technology doesn’t pan out. “Now there are widespread negative outcomes for the whole economy.”

The most likely? He figures it’s some combination of the second and third scenarios. Inside C-suites, there’s just too much fear of missing out on the AI boom to envision the hype machine slowing down any time soon, he says, and “when the hype gets intensified, the fall is unlikely to be soft.”

Second-quarter figures illustrate the magnitude of the spending frenzy. Four companies alone—Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Platforms—invested more than $50 billion into capital spending in the quarter, with much of that going toward AI.

Today’s large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are impressive in many respects, Acemoglu says. So why can’t they replace humans, or at least help them a lot, at many jobs? He points to reliability issues and a lack of human-level wisdom or judgment, which will make people unlikely to outsource many white-collar jobs to AI anytime soon. Nor is AI going to be able to automate physical jobs like construction or janitorial, he says.

“You need highly reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully implement certain steps that previously workers were doing,” he said. “They can do that in a few places with some human supervisory oversight”—like coding—”but in most places they cannot.”

“That’s a reality check for where we are right now,” he said.

2024 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

For centuries, the Roncal Valley, in the Navarrese Pyrenees, has pleased the world’s palates through the unique cheese that bears its name. The first Spanish cheese to receive Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, Roncal owes its signature piquant bouquet to a closely guarded production process, which has historically used the milk of an indigenous breed of sheep called the latxa. This breed, named after the Basque word for “sour,” is productive enough to satisfy the artisanal needs of the local cheese-making industry.

Problems arose, however, when some family farms in adjoining villages began importing assaf sheep from Israel, which could yield more—about seven times more—milk with far less labor. From a profit-driven perspective, replacing the homely latxa with the powerhouse assaf would appear a no-brainer.

Indeed, the Roncal Regulatory Council, with strong representation by the cheese processors, successfully appealed to the European Union to open the PDO to include cheese produced with assaf milk. But the farmers of Roncal protested, winning the next Council elections, and successfully lobbied the EU to rescind the inclusion of assaf milk.

On the surface, centuries-old cheese-making traditions in a remote valley in northern Spain might seem worlds apart from modern business practice. But Sarah Wittman, assistant professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason University, argues that the Roncal farmers represent a common type of organizational activity overlooked by past researchers.

Her recent paper in Organizational Theory, co-authored by Frédéric Godart of INSEAD, investigates what motivates “purist” organizations, like the Roncal cheese artisans, for whom success is not entirely defined by market-driven metrics.

Speaking of the world-renowned Trappist monks, who brew what many claim is the best-tasting beer in the world out of monasteries in Belgium and the Netherlands, Wittman explains, “They’re not doing it because they’re in the market. They’re doing it because that’s what enables them to be monks.”

At the same time, they take great pride in their ales because the quality of their product is bound up with their religious vocation. Wittman summarizes their working ethos as, “I brew beer as a religious object, and I’m going to give everything to it because this is my religious task.”

Purists, then, march to a very different drummer than more “rational,” or conventional, organizations. Instead of crafting a brand identity to woo consumers, purists find fulfillment through activity that affirms their firmly held sense of self. While they will go to great lengths to preserve their purity when it is threatened, they will not take a single step that would possibly compromise their integrity.

Wittman’s paper teases out how purism can affect organizational structure, strategy and success. The researchers posit that a compartmentalized structure may emerge within larger organizations, whereby pockets of purism are allowed to exist amid more conventionally motivated businesses. An example would be the most innovative R&D units at 3M, which are largely insulated from market pressures so as to safeguard their creativity.

The researchers further theorize that because purists’ real motivation—affirming their sense of identity—often has little to do with the business they happen to be in (e.g. monks brewing beer), purists are more likely to be game-changers in their field, rather than following established industry practice.

For purists to be successful in the marketplace, they need to find an appreciative audience that doesn’t mistake their scruples for snobbery. Tastemakers in relevant fields, whose refined sensibilities respond well to purism, can make a big difference by conferring higher status upon purists. This, in turn, can help influence the opinions of consumers, shareholders, etc.

Additionally, purists can let their results speak for them, as with the Trappist monks. Ordinary beer-drinkers may or may not care about the monks’ religious devotion, but will nonetheless pay a premium for a beverage that meets the highest taste standards.

However, purists can attract contempt if their way of working is seen to conflict with basic norms that the audience holds dear. ESG investment funds which follow a social rather than capitalist logic, for example, have alienated some in the conventional finance world for upholding a set of standards perceived to deviate from the core task of making money. One could imagine that an NGO whose purism centered around chasing big-money donors instead of providing services would be condemned just as readily.

Wittman hopes her research will widen the scope of conversations around the organizational mission and meaningful work. “We cannot explain everything with this market-economy survival motive, because there exists a logic outside of that.

“What we most often study (and teach) in business schools is that everyone succumbs to the market and plays the competitive positioning game or goes out of business. But if purists have enough power, gain enough status, then there is this bolstering of support that says either they’re legitimate or they’re authentic—then they’re the ones who create the market.”