Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire More Minority Professors?

Back in the early 1990s, when colleges throughout the United States were desperately trying to recruit more minority professors, Duke University came up with a particularly ambitious plan. It announced that it would double the number of its black professors within a decade.

Did Duke succeed?

Anyone seeking to answer that question — at Duke and at other universities that launched aggressive recruiting plans — should be prepared to do some ferocious number crunching, and to understand that the outcome can depend a lot on who’s doing the counting.

By Duke’s yardstick — its calculations look at the entire faculty — the university did hit its goal. The number of black professors grew from 44 in 1993 to 98 a decade later, and to 120 in 2007, the latest year for which data are available. But among tenured and tenure-track faculty members — the measure that experts believe counts most — Duke fell short and still hasn’t hit the mark. The university had 62 tenured or tenure-track black professors in 2007, a far cry from doubling the 36 on the campus in 1993. In the past four years, the number of tenured and tenure-track black professors has actually dropped, by five.

Nationwide, minority and female faculty members were trailblazers in the 1960s and 1970s. Only in the past generation have most colleges adopted large-scale plans to diversify their faculties. The Chronicle revisited ambitious plans announced at five universities during the past two decades to see how they have fared. Besides Duke, they are Harvard University, Virginia Tech, and the Universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Wisconsin at Madison.

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