Affirmative action advances a multi-dimensional nature of excellence.
It encourages us to recognize pluralism and diversity as a dimension of our value system. Accordingly, a search committee must create a diverse pool of candidates with a significant representation of women and minorities. A candidate's ability to provide cultural diversity to a department, to serve as a role model for students, and to offer a range of perspectives and scholarly interests should be major elements in the evaluation and selection process. MYTH Conducting a search that is responsive to affirmative action concerns is costly, tedious, and time consuming. If one employs proper management skills, conducting a search that is sensitive to affirmative action issues need not take significantly more time than conducting a search which is insensitive to those issues.