Community Involvement

The burden of our collective responsibility to instigate and ensure change should not fall solely upon underrepresented physicists. Being underrepresented already places acute stress on these groups. It is crucial to get everyone, including and especially those who are not members of minoritized populations, on board to make the Department (and world) a more just and equitable place. We as a Department should collectively take a stand, declaring publicly and demonstrating through action that this matters to us as a community. As one of the top physics programs in the country, we should be setting an example, both for other programs and for all the physicists we train by mobilizing them to join in solidarity with minoritized students and scientists throughout the international academic community.

 

Recommendations

  • Recommendation 20 (Immediate action requested): Build an ethos of community involvement and ensure non-marginalized members of the community share in DEI labor
  • Recommendation 21: Compensate service work beyond the regular duties of one’s position
  • Recommendation 22: Rework our definition of merit at all career stages

 

Recommendation 20. (Immediate action requested)
That the Department foster an ethos of community involvement among MIT physicists and ensure that non-marginalized members of our community share in the division of labor. 

Our community is held together by a single, deep connection: a love of physics. Every one of us came to MIT because we want to spend our days engaged in the learning and discovery of this seemingly pure field of knowledge. Unfortunately, the actual practice of physics is inextricably intertwined with the messiness of the human beings involved in its advancement. Broader societal forces affect both access to and progression through academia. Factors like natural curiosity, interest, hard work, and talent are not the only ones that influence the opportunity to engage with our beautiful subject; matters of race, gender, class, and other factors come into play as well. Active work is needed from all members of our discipline to break down barriers and to allow everyone to just do physics. 

Among many physicists in our Department, there is a mentality that involvement in DEI and community work is unimportant, if not actively harmful, because of the time it takes that could otherwise be spent on research. This type of mentality and the culture it creates perpetuate inequities that the field of physics has permitted for far too long. Everyone in the community needs to step up so that underrepresented physicists do not face the dual pressures of both contending with obstacles to doing physics and having to shoulder the full burden of knocking down those obstacles for the next generation. 

Change needs to come from the top down. Faculty serve as teachers, role models, and gatekeepers to our field, and therefore have a responsibility to not only stop conveying the harmful message that DEI work is unimportant but also to actively communicate that DEI work is a vital part of our work as physicists. Faculty and staff should actively encourage all community members to take responsibility and actively praise student and postdoc involvement in advocacy organizations, department committees, mentoring initiatives, and other types of service and community work. 

There are two forms of work that are often disproportionately assigned to underrepresented physicists. The first is DEI labor, the second is “office housework”.

  1. DEI labor: While the important points of view that URM, women, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized physicists gain from their lived experiences are fundamental to the research and planning stages of DEI efforts, the burden of labor in designing and enacting improvements should not primarily fall upon members of underrepresented groups. It is important to ensure that non-marginalized members of the Physics community take part in the effort required to improve our community. We request that the Department require or incentivize participation in DEI work by non-minoritized faculty, both at the hiring and tenure stage (see Recommendation 22) as well as for senior faculty through other means, one possibility including a tie to merit pay increases. Similar ideas can be implemented for postdocs and graduate students (see Recommendations 4 and 7). We note that the Physics Values Committee maintains on its website a list of ways to get involved that is particularly comprehensive for undergraduate and graduate students. 
     
  2. Office housework: The Department should also regularly remind research groups, committees, and other department organizations to evaluate to whom they assign “office housework” tasks that are historically associated with women and minorities, such as note-taking during meetings, cleaning or organization of workspaces and labs, purchasing food for groups, scheduling events, planning parties, and other such duties. If a pattern emerges, group leaders should reconsider how they request volunteers and/or assign these roles. Committees should also consider how much of their work is carried by underrepresented team members. 

 

Recommendation 21.
That the Department provide recognition and compensation to those who perform large amounts of service to the Department beyond the regular duties of their position. 

Outstanding outreach efforts, mentoring, service work, and promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion in physics are worthy of recognition, just as we recognize the importance of teaching responsibilities and laud those whose teaching performance is exceptional. 

We recommend that the Department create Service Fellowships that can be funded at the 10% TA, 20% TA, and full-time levels for graduate students who devote significant effort to service, mentoring, and outreach in our Department. There are many examples of such positions at MIT and other institutions, including full-time TA positions at McGill Physics, and extra pay positions through the Harvard D&I Fellows, Princeton Diversity Fellows, and MIT Graduate Community Fellows. 

Furthermore, we note that the Department provides recognition for undergraduates who engage in service to the Department; we recommend that the Department create a parallel award for graduate students who demonstrate outstanding outreach efforts, mentoring, or service to our physics community. 

 

Recommendation 22.
That the Department reconsider its definition of merit at all career stages.  

We recognize that at this moment in time, the only explicit requirement that the Department imposes for faculty applications is research prowess; we do not even require any past teaching experience to receive a professorship. It would represent a major paradigm shift for the Department to require consideration of experiences and strengths outside of research in its review of candidates. However, we do not believe that such a paradigm shift is unreasonable, given our community values. If we truly believe that mentoring and teaching are important, and that making our Department and our field more diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) is a worthy goal, then requiring consideration of teaching experience and commitment to DEI in our hiring processes are steps that we as a Department should be willing to take. There are multiple possible ways that we as a Department can do so. 

For example, the Department could institute a more holistic review of candidates that explicitly calls for hiring committees to consider an additional set of criteria outside of research in its review of candidates, including teaching, mentoring, advocacy, and outreach work. Alternatively, the Department could set a baseline level of participation in science-related advocacy or outreach work as a prerequisite for any postdoctoral or faculty application to our Department to even be considered, as well as for promotion cases. We note that instituting formal requirements that recognize and/or require activities outside of pure research has extensive past precedent in the field of physics; for example, in awarding grants, NSF evaluates applicants on the basis of two primary criteria: Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts.

Examples of acceptable activities include but are not limited to work to improve DEI in STEM through student and postdoctoral organizations, department bodies, university committees, or professional societies; mentoring activities; STEM outreach at the K-12 or university level; science advocacy in the political sphere; and in special cases, research-related mentoring of underrepresented and underserved students above and beyond the call of duty of one's job.  These baseline expectations should be clearly specified on the Department website to encourage all physicists to become involved in community activities, advocacy, mentoring, and volunteer work. 

To evaluate candidate participation in these efforts, the Department should require applicants to include on their CV sections about teaching and mentoring, as well as about outreach, advocacy, and service. The Department should also require candidates to write statements about their past and potential future contributions to DEI and teaching in all faculty hiring, promoting, and tenure cases (see, for example, Cornell and the University of Oregon). We also suggest that the Department look into possibilities for evaluating faculty candidate character outside of just research recommendation letters; for example, by calling applicant supervisors for all candidates on the shortlist. (See also Recommendation 7f.)

In addition, we recognize that in many fields, postdoctoral scholars often primarily serve the purpose of filling much-needed technical positions in research groups, due to the nature of the grants funding their employment. Nevertheless, it is important that the Department ensures equity at the postdoctoral level of hiring so that there is not an unintended leak in our pipeline of talented underrepresented physicists. In addition, postdoctoral scholars play a crucial role in mentoring students, as well as in setting the tone and culture of the laboratories in which they work. We urge the Department to examine ways in which it can provide more oversight of postdoctoral scholars in each of its Divisions, to ensure both the equitable hiring of postdocs, as well as the hiring and training of postdocs who promote equity. (See also Recommendation 4.)

While the above requirements would primarily set a precedent for ensuring that all physicists put thought into the role they can play in DEI efforts, they also serve another purpose. Underrepresented physicists are often burdened with a disproportionate amount of time doing committee work, service work, and unrecognized mentorship of marginalized students. Making this component of the application required will also allow those highly involved in these efforts to feel free to speak more openly to those experiences to the committee, which can then consider exceptional involvement in DEI activities that might have taken time away from even further improving a research record that is already spectacular.

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