The committee then selected who would make up the coming year's cohort, usually no more than eight fellows. That meant not every department would get its request. CPPFD applicants effectively competed with people who weren't in the department they intended to work in.
Cohorts consisted of an average of five to six fellows each year, yet the CPPFD garnered anywhere from 150 to 250 applicants, Kurt Ribisl, chair of the Department of Health Behavior, said.
Though the program was two years long, departments had to be honest with their fellows about their chances being hired after their first year, a CPPFD alumnus who requested to remain anonymous to protect their employment said. Fellows often had a chance to do a job talk near the end of or after their first year, after which the entire department voted on whether the fellow would join the faculty.
In this respect, the CPPFD felt like being interviewed for over a year, William Sturkey, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and CPPFD alumnus, said.
Sturkey said he tracked how many times he went for coffee or attended an informal meeting with a faculty member. His tally: 30.
“There's some advantages [in] that you can kind of make friends, and you can really get to know the department more,” he said. “But the way that you're vetted over that year is much more intense than any other faculty position.”
Still, the CPPFD hiring process had its benefits compared to a standard national search, which is how departments usually hire faculty.
Advantages to the program for fellows
Anderson-Thompkins, who directed the CPPFD from 2007 to 2020, said in traditional national searches, there is a lot of bias — from the perception of scholars of color, to the perceived pedigree of the schools they come from, to even if the name of the candidate is perceived as ethnic. She said diverse candidates are often cut early in the process before receiving an invite for a campus visit and in-person interviews.
“So when people come back and say, ‘Oh, well, we want to make sure that we're not creating an unfair process,’ or, ‘We want to make sure that everyone goes through the same process,’” Anderson-Thompkins said, “there's a lot of bias in the national search process.”
Anderson-Thompkins also said CPPFD fellows generally came into the program with fewer publications, putting them at a disadvantage in the job market.
In contrast, Anderson-Thompkins said the CPPFD process allows tenure track hopefuls to be considered for two years rather than two or three Zoom interviews. Departments were able to speak with candidates they wished to recommend to the University-wide committee to get enough information for a strong nomination letter, as Purifoy said was the case for her.
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While participating in the program, fellows received protected research time in which they were not required to teach. Unlike other postdoctoral programs, fellows conduct their own — not their mentor's — research, Julia Yi, a CPPFD alum and assistant professor at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, said.
Yi completed a couple of research projects during her fellowship. Some of her work focused on the language and literacy skills of female adolescents involved in foster care or the juvenile justice system. Yi won a DEI Mini Grant award from the UNC School of Medicine for her research in 2023.
“I was really productive in publishing papers and doing a couple of research projects that would have taken me probably double the time if I had been in another postdoctoral fellowship,” Yi said.
CPPFD's impact on departments
In 2008, 25 years after the CPPFD was founded, 113 of the 132 graduates had found tenure track positions at UNC or elsewhere. But in the first two and a half decades of the program, Anderson-Thompkins said the University struggled to retain fellows as faculty members.
Still, graduates of the program found tenure-track positions at universities like Yale, Stanford or Duke. So Anderson-Thompkins encouraged deans and department chairs to think ahead about their hiring priorities, aligning selection of fellows to those priorities.
Between 2010 and 2021, the University hired fellows as tenure-track faculty at UNC at around an 80 to 90 percent rate, Anderson-Thompkins said. Some years, the University hired a full CPPFD cohort.
“I really shifted the focus from the idea that there was something lacking in the scholars, that they needed remedial work or additional work on themselves,” Anderson-Thompkins said. “But [I] focused more on what the people who were doing the hiring and tenure needed to do to better understand the barriers and challenges, obstacles that faculty of color faced in the academy.”
The CPPFD helped departments hire experts in niche, underrepresented subjects. Purifoy said the Department of Geography recruited her in large part because it wanted to launch a minor in environmental justice.
Ribisl said having diverse faculty in a department makes it more competitive for grants. His department often does community-engaged partnerships, and community organizations prefer to work with faculty who grew up in similar, underrepresented communities.
Ribisl gave the example of a former CPPFD fellow in the Department of Health Behavior who, with now-retired professor Geni Eng, worked with a community health organization in Greensboro on research to reduce bias in doctors treating Black lung cancer patients.
“Having individuals who come from the groups that are bearing the greater disease burden is really important to help with a solution,” Ribisl said.
In its Dec. 5 statement, UNC Media Relations said the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research is focused on new programs.
“This October, the OVCR launched the Catalyst Faculty Research Cluster Program which aims to advance impactful interdisciplinary scholarship at Carolina through recruitment and retention of scholars within strategic research clusters and provide the professional development and training that were hallmarks of the CPPFD,” Media Relations said in the statement.
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