If America is the land of opportunity, then earning a college degree is the key to really tapping the potential of that opportunity. In the last century, going to college has transitioned from something reserved for the elite to something that everyday citizens can aspire to do (with enough financial aid). There’s certainly a case to be made for the need for more diversity on college campuses, but overall our nation’s university system is improving the variety of students on campus and making the experience attainable to all class levels. It’s not perfect; but there’s a push to improve.
One area where colleges and universities consistently fall short, however, is in the number of minority faculty they employ. There are not enough professors of color. There are not enough women. There are not enough who represent the LBGTQ+ community. If we truly want our student body to be diverse and feed into a diverse workplace, we need to start where those students are earning their educations.
Compared to the general U.S. population, diversity in college faculty is much lower. This isn’t to say that all the professors are White and of European descent, though that number is high. A recent report from Mother Jones found that, “At some schools, like Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Princeton, there are more foreign teachers than Hispanic and black teachers combined.”
So we are hiring diverse faculty members on a global stage, but not a national one. There are an estimated 41.7 million Black Americans, and an estimated 54 million Hispanic ones, according to the 2010 U.S. Census numbers. That comes out to about 13.2 percent and 17 percent of the total U.S. population, respectively. To put this in perspective, there are student protests going on at Michigan public universities, demanding that 10 percent of faculty members be African-American. When you take urban areas like Detroit (where 84.3 percent of the population is Black) into account, asking for 10 percent is a drop in the bucket ― yet students are rallying to get the support to make it happen.
