While the College recognizes that improving the diversity of its faculty and staff remains a long-term goal, Grinnell’s 217 faculty members come from remarkably diverse backgrounds, especially since the College began its Faculty Diversity Initiative in 2000. With tenure-track/tenured faculty at 18 percent faculty of color and 41 percent women, tenured faculty at 12 percent faculty of color and 40 percent women, and pre-tenure at 34 percent faculty of color and 42 percent women, (Self-study, pp 34-36), Grinnell’s record has become a model for recruitment of diversity.

Faculty are teacher/scholars who see these two parts of their professional lives as more complementary than competing. Tenure requires peer-reviewed scholarship, foregrounded by excellent teaching. No faculty member will achieve tenure without research success and an excellent, proven teaching record. Most colleges make this claim. At Grinnell, it is true.

At Grinnell, faculty place sincere value on teaching and learning and on achieving the goals of curricular diversity; nowhere is this value more evident than in the vitality of collaboration among faculty members to develop courses. Faculty attend lunches to discuss new curricular directions, consult with Instructional Technology Specialists (ITS) to learn how to apply innovative technologies, spend parts of their summers in workshops to develop syllabi, or attend each other’s classes to discover new teaching techniques and subject matter. Team-teaching, joint course meetings, and other modes of interdisciplinary practice are more common as faculty work to realize their interdisciplinary aspirations both in research and in courses. While many great colleges and universities stress the importance of the classroom, strikingly few have embraced the teaching and learning mission as a vital part of intellectual life in the way that Grinnell College has done.