Epistemic Dynamics and Intersectionality in Faculty Hiring: Who Presents as Engaged Scholars?

Higher education institutions widely promote engaged scholarship, yet it remains undervalued in academic reward systems, such as hiring and promotion, and it is especially risky for early career scholars. Using a unique data set of 138,738 applications for assistant professor positions, this study links large-scale demographic hiring data with applicants’ substantive presentation of self through the language they use in their materials regarding engaged scholarship. Results show that women of color are the most likely to present themselves as engaged scholars, drawing on long-standing traditions of public-serving epistemologies among historically marginalized scholars, even as such work remains unevenly rewarded. Centering applicants rather than evaluators highlights how scholars navigate disciplinary norms and exercise agency in shaping their professional identities. These patterns reveal how inequalities, epistemic and otherwise, may be reproduced in academic evaluation and show which scholars might be taking early career risks to pursue public-oriented scholarship—a core mission of public institutions.