Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: Lisa Lynch

The Transformation of the Higher Education Workforce: Promises Made, Promises Kept, Promises Broken?

Lisa M. Lynch, Visiting Professor of Public Policy and Stone Visiting Scholar (2025-2026), Harvard Kennedy School

Abstract: In the fall of 2015, students at universities across the U.S demonstrated in solidarity with students at the University of Missouri, protesting racism and discrimination on campus. Some colleges and universities responded with commitments to increase the diversity of their faculty and student bodies, along with new training programs for students and faculty, and more funding for campus cultural centers.  In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, more demonstrations took place across the country protesting policing policies and practices and demanding racial justice. In response, over 100 colleges and universities issued statements on racial justice and developed new anti-racism plans. But since 2022 many states, followed by the federal government in 2025, have pushed back on campus efforts to improve campus culture, inclusivity, and diversity with legislation and threats of fines and withdrawal of funding. This talk will present data on trends in faculty hiring in the US over the past thirty years with a particular focus on changes in the demographic composition of faculty in R1 (highly research-intensive universities) since 2015 and characteristics associated with these changes. 

Lisa M. Lynch is the 2025-26 Stone Visiting Scholar/Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University.  Before her appointment at Harvard, she was the director of the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity at Brandeis and co-director of the Retirement and Disability Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  At Brandeis, she served as Provost (2014-15 and 2016-2020), Interim President (2015-2016), and Dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management (2008-2014). She is a past president of the Labor and Employment Relations Association and was an elected member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association. Lynch has extensive public policy experience, having served as the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor (1995-1997); director (2004-2009), and chair (2007-2009) of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; and chair of the Conference of Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System (2009). She has published extensively on the impact of technological change, organizational innovation (especially training), and unionization on productivity and wages, as well as the determinants of youth unemployment and race and gender differences in labor market outcomes. She has also been a faculty member at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, MIT's Sloan School of Management, the Ohio State University, and the University of Bristol. She received her BA in economics and political science from Wellesley College, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics.