Criminal Justice System-Impacted Faculty: Motivations, Barriers, and Successes on the Academic Job Market

Abstract

US higher education institutions strive to build diverse faculties, yet institutions put up significant barriers to hiring scholars who have been impacted by the criminal justice system ( system-impacted). Because of the demographics of the system-impacted population, these faculty candidates are more likely to be people of color. In addition, system-impacted faculty offer unique benefits to institutions and deserve equal consideration among peers on the academic job market. We argue that making the hiring process fairer for system-impacted candidates is an important strategy for diversifying the college faculty. To understand the challenges they face, we conducted semi-structured interviews of seven faculty with prior felony convictions to explore their motivations for pursuing faculty careers and how they navigated the academic job market. By sharing their stories, this article raises awareness of a marginalized population of faculty and offers new insights into their motivations, barriers, and successes in getting hired. Importantly, we found that deciding when and how to disclose their criminal histories was the most complicated part of the process for our participants, in part because of ambiguous criminal background check policies. To ensure equal opportunity and to form a more diverse faculty, we propose that higher education institutions eliminate the use of criminal history information in college admissions and faculty hiring processes or implement fairer, more transparent background check policies based in best practices.