2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) challenges in engineering are more evident at the graduate level where racial and ethnic diversity remains particularly low, and PhD completion rates are extremely low for students from marginalized backgrounds. The purpose of this research paper is to understand how engineering faculty members’ beliefs and perceptions about DEIB influence their intention to promote DEIB actions in their graduate research lab groups. Engineering faculty members who are novices to discussions of race and inequity or lack DEIB background knowledge may inadvertently adopt viewpoints, assumptions, or policies in their graduate research lab groups that inadvertently harm or cause distrust among doctoral students, especially those of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. Therefore, faculty are essential stakeholders in creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive lab group environments that are shaped by chosen learning approaches, lab policies (e.g., hiring process and selection criteria), and student mentoring relationships. Using an embedded mixed-methods design, we recruited tenured and tenure-track engineering faculty from R1 institutions across the United States to complete a quantitative survey and participate in an in-depth, semi-structured, qualitative interview. Survey results offered initial inputs associated with faculty’s perceived value for, and likelihood of implementing DEIB practices and activities in their graduate research lab group. Findings from qualitative interviews provided rich contextual information that illuminates how faculty think about DEIB graduate research lab strategies and practices. Overall, this study highlights the explicit role of faculty as systemic gatekeepers in field-wide efforts to make graduate engineering education diverse, inclusive, and equitable. This research paper points to strategies for overcoming different aspects of faculty resistance in order to scale up DEIB in graduate engineering research environments.