Despite decades of research and recommendations, a revolving door continues to cycle Black and Hispanic faculty into and out of predominantly White higher education institutions.
Interviews with the scholars and researchers who have examined this issue in recent years suggest that, although some institutions have ramped up their recruitment and retention efforts, more proactive measures need to be taken. In addition, numerous racial incidents on university campuses have focused attention on the composition of faculty at many top universities.
A lawsuit filed this year by a surgeon at UCLA, the only tenured African-American faculty member in his department, raised the specter of racism to a new level. Dr. Christian Head sued the board of regents in April for a series of discriminatory actions including a slideshow in 2006 depicting him as a gorilla being sodomized by his White supervisor; it was shown at a UCLA School of Medicine graduation roast.
Head’s suit highlights just one of a number of incidents targeting African-Americans and other minorities in academia.
Reports of racial intolerance and insensitivity have become commonplace. In recent months, several incidents garnered national publicity. Members of Northwestern University’s ski team dressed in stereotypical “ethnic” costumes and ridiculed various cultural groups; on the same campus, a Latina student reported being taunted by a group of girls in broken Spanish. A bottle-throwing incident at Cornell and the defacing of an African-American’s memorial portrait at Purdue also occurred in 2012.
Diversity Hard to Find
In the aftermath of the Northwestern incidents, African-American and Hispanic students, joined by others, demanded that the university release an internal white paper on diversity and inclusion that had been completed in 2010 but not made public. One of its findings was that “options are limited for students to take classes with faculty of color because the number of faculty of color is limited, and in many departments non-existent.”
