Recruitment Without Retention is EDI Performance Art: An Open Letter to Florentine Strzelczyk and the Western Community

Photo by Andrej Lisakov on Unsplash

We thought we were building toward meaningful change.

Our department made a commitment to diversifying our faculty. We advocated, we allocated resources to the search, we recruited thoughtfully, and we successfully hired two exceptional early-career scholars from underrepresented groups. We celebrated these hires as meaningful steps toward building a department that better reflects the communities we serve and study.

Now we're poised to lose an amazing scholar, mentor, and colleague to another institution. Not because they weren't excellent. Not because they didn't fit. But because when faced with circumstances requiring institutional flexibility and support, our administration chose inaction.

Our advocacy for reasonable, feasible solutions was met with what could only be described as an institutional shrug. We sat down with the Dean and made clear the many negative impacts that our colleague’s departure would have on our department’s operations and morale. His response: ‘sometimes people leave’[1] - as if the departure were inevitable rather than entirely preventable.

The Evidence on Revolving Door Diversity

The literature on diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic institutions is unambiguous: recruitment efforts in the absence of retention strategies don't just fail, they can actively harm institutional culture and the individuals they claim to support. Research consistently demonstrates that hiring faculty from underrepresented groups without providing adequate mentorship, resources, and systemic support creates what has been termed "revolving door diversity"—a pattern that signals to future candidates that the institution isn't serious about change.

Underrepresented faculty often face additional service burdens, navigating unsupportive departmental cultures, and addressing structural barriers that their majority-group colleagues don't encounter. When institutions fail to address these realities, they (we) transform diversity initiatives from meaningful reform into what amounts to performative hiring—checking boxes without committing to the harder work of institutional change.

The Political Moment Is No Excuse

It is clear that we're living through a period of backlash against equity-focused initiatives. The discourse around 'wokeism' has created an environment that has seen many institutions retreat from commitments to diversity and inclusion, treating these efforts as political liabilities rather than institutional necessities. That said, the work of building representative, equitable academic institutions is not a political trend to be abandoned when it becomes uncomfortable. It remains a fundamental obligation to the communities we serve.

I'm also aware that universities are facing financial constraints. Budgets are tight, provincial funding is inadequate, and administrators are navigating genuine resource limitations. But when we cite budget constraints as prohibitive to our retention efforts, what are we really saying? We implicitly suggest that the cost of losing exceptional faculty, repeating recruitment processes, damaging our reputation, and signaling to future candidates that we won't support them are acceptable. We're deciding that short-term budget relief matters more than long-term institutional capacity. These are choices about priorities, not inevitable consequences of austerity.

Our department's faculty composition does not reflect the broader Canadian population. It does not reflect the populations we study in our research. It does not reflect the students we teach and mentor. This misalignment represents a failure to fulfill our core academic mission. How can we draw valid inferences about human behavior when our perspectives are so limited? How can we effectively mentor the full diversity of our students when they see so few people like themselves in positions of academic authority? These questions continue to matter deeply, regardless of the political climate.

No More Half Measures

We should no longer accept the notion that hiring someone and failing to support them counts as progress. We cannot, in good conscience, celebrate recruitment numbers while ignoring retention failures. An administrative posture that treats faculty departures as inevitable rather than as a direct consequence of institutional failure is an embarrassment.

In establishing the Office of EDI, the University established a goal ‘to promote, recognize, celebrate and engage various voices around campus to create a more equitable, diverse and inclusive Western community’. If we are serious about building an institution that lives up to those aims, we need to move beyond performative gestures. Some examples might include:

1. Investing in the development of resources to support faculty retention

2. Creating flexible institutional policies that acknowledge diverse experiences

3. Holding our academic leaders accountable for their failures in this space

   
   

This situation didn't have to happen. Every step of this failure was a choice—to recruit without adequate retention support, to meet requests for action with bureaucratic inertia, to prioritize institutional convenience over people. It’s time to make better choices.

[1] I’m not an industrial-organizational psychologist, but telling an entire department that you don’t care if they stay or leave seems bad for business.