Academic Leaders' Diversity Attitudes: Their Role in Predicting Faculty Support for Institutional Diversity

Garnering faculty support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is increasingly important. Methods for fostering faculty support of DEI have largely centered on formal workshops and interventions. We extend this work by drawing on the trickle-down model and its underlying theories (social learning theory, social information processing theory) to investigate whether a recurring source of social influence-academic leaders-spur faculty DEI support. We develop a model in which academic leaders' diversity-related attitudes interact with faculty gender to predict faculty endorsement of institutional diversity in higher education over time. Specifically, we propose that academic leaders' diversity attitudes have a stronger effect on male faculty, who tend to have less personal experience with bias than women, providing greater opportunity for building their awareness. We also hypothesize that faculty perceptions of bias mediate this relationship, uncovering awareness of inequity as a predictor of diversity endorsement. We tested this multilevel moderated mediation model using two climate surveys of academic leaders (N = 70) and full-time faculty (N = 254) at a flagship university in the United States. Each hypothesis was supported: Men but not women reported greater perceived bias in academia when their leaders held more positive diversity attitudes. In turn, perceived bias predicted faculty endorsement of institutional diversity 2 years later, mediating the relationship. This work suggests that academic leaders are role models and educators for diversity-related initiatives, particularly for men. We discuss the implications of this work for heightening the success of DEI in higher education.