2025 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Keyword: Faculty
This practitioner presentation addresses the necessary conditions for peer review to serve as an equity practice in the academy. Without these conditions in place, peer review can act as a gatekeeping mechanism that reinforces the status quo, limits inclusion, and curtails the range of perspectives needed to solve the engineering and computing challenges of our day. Such experiences with peer review also cause many of us to lose faith in our colleagues and in the academic endeavor as a whole.

We examine peer review as an equity practice through the lens of a professional development program in use at NSF related to peer review of grant proposals. Game Changer Academies™ for Advancing Research Innovation (GCA) is designed by Kardia Group to prepare faculty in the practice of deliberative democracy: fair and reasonable discussion of competing arguments and viewpoints to secure the public good. Deliberative democracy as a practice supports more robust and equitable peer review. Specifically, we identify key factors that enable peer review to disrupt institutional and other prestige-based hierarchies, enable broader participation, and more readily recognize innovation and new approaches and solutions to complex problems.

Department and disciplinary life is structured around many formal and iterative deliberative democracy processes: faculty meetings, graduate student admissions, faculty searches, promotion and tenure, awards committees, and the many peer review practices associated with research and publishing. By providing tools, awareness, and resources, GCA fosters productive discussion, connection, and collaboration among scholars and the meaningful interchange of diverse perspectives required to achieve the full goals of peer review.

At the heart of the GCA curriculum is the understanding that intellect is necessary but not sufficient in the peer review process. Individual intellectual skills, critical thinking capacities, and scholarly expertise have their place, allowing us to conceptualize standards of excellence and evaluate output against these metrics. But, as powerful as ideas are, intellectual prowess is not enough. Intellectual prowess is even more limited when the systems in which it is exercised are subject to exclusionary structures and power dynamics. To achieve the goals of peer review, intellectual prowess must be combined with checks and balances, a variety of perspectives, and effective deliberation practices that expand the group intelligence beyond the individual.

Deliberative democracy is enacted through healthy group dynamics, mitigation of cognitive biases, harnessing the benefits of diverse perspectives, and the ability to effectively navigate the complexities of conflict. When these qualities are firmly interwoven with intellectual aptitude, we more reliably achieve our intellectual goals, more meaningfully produce equity in deliberative outcomes such as faculty searches, and strengthen the community of scholars.

This presentation will describe tools that actualize deliberative democracy in the ways that faculty interact, make decisions together, and make a difference in this world. Participants will engage in demonstrations of group dynamics gone awry, discuss cognitive tools that provide solutions, explore the role of reflection and humor in deliberative processes, and practice skills in facilitated hands-on experiences.