The effect of institution mission drift on STEM faculty career advancement at a striving university

Barriers women of color (WoC) (i.e., African American, Latina American, and Native American) faculty face in the pursuit of their career in STEM disciplines at predominately white colleges and universities in the United States are well documented. However, heretofore, the challenge of mission drift [10] was never identified. Two focus groups, consisting largely of tenure-track WoC STEM faculty (three from science, three from technology and one from math), were conducted at RIT during the spring of 2013. The participants were at RIT for an average of four years. Analysis of the data collected, using the constant-comparative method [12], reveals that institution mission drift presents a significant barrier to RIT WoC STEM faculty´s career advancement.