In the 1990s, many institutions made a concerted effort to hire more Black faculty members. The universities were propelled by a number of civil rights lawsuits in higher education whose outcomes mandated swift action by states to remedy the effects of segregation in higher education and by White House guidelines reaffirming the need for affirmative action. These schools, including Duke University and the University of Michigan, sought intentionally to recruit faculty of color to their ranks.
However, 20 years later, though there has been an increase in the number of non-White faculty members overall, National Center for Education Statistics data show that increase has primarily been among Asian faculty members. The percentage of Black professors on campus has increased only incrementally, while the number of Native American faculty has remained consistent over the last 20 years. (Female professors, however, have seen consistent, though modest, increases across all ethnicities.)
Dr. Jerlando F. L. Jackson, Vilas Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and director and chief research scientist of Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says “there still remain significant concerns about our institutions’” commitment to diversity.
“It doesn’t take an empirical study … to see that there are some places where you can see some movement and some where there’s none at all,” he says of the hiring trends.
Christopher Torres, a faculty member at The Ohio State University at Mansfield and the Latino & Latin American Space for Engagement and Research (LASER), said that, as a Latino faculty member, it was little things such as not seeing any faculty of color on the staff portraits in the faculty lounge.
“There are pictures of the faculty over the years, but it isn’t until, I think, the ’80s when there’s only one [faculty member of color].
… And it wasn’t until I really started looking at it [that] I started thinking there’s no one really that looks like me,” he says.
