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[bowlingfordollars]

The undergraduate population at my school is reported as (approx):
      Black non-Hispanic: 5%
      American Indian or Alaskan Native: 1%
      Asian or Pacific Islander: 4%
      Hispanic:   2%

In my 5 years of teaching in the humanities (with a strong premodern historical focus) in large introductory lectures as well as smaller classes, I have taught about 750 students, including exactly one black student, two Asian students, and none at all who were Hispanic.  Colleagues report similar impressions.  Clearly we're not attracting a cross-section of the student population. I could understand the whiteness of the lecture halls if we were teaching courses with titles like "Great Hungarian Patriots" or "Scottish Engineers whose Names you should Know" or even "Hard Philosophical Books by Dead Greeks" -- but what we do is considerably broader than that, and deliberately multicultural (pardon the buzzword).  Moreover, our department faculty is considerably more diverse than the students who show up in our courses.

Anyone else have similar experiences with skewed student populations like this?  Where are all the students of color?  Why won't they even give my department's courses a try? My own guess is that there must be some odd  stereotypes about certain disciplines operating in students' minds when they choose their courses. Any advice on how to combat this, and make general historical humanities courses seem attractive to a more diverse population, especially to more first-generation students?

[joey_fan]

This is indeed a vexing problem. I also teach at a relatively diverse campus in a premodern humanities program with strong multicultural interests, etc. and yes, there are very few minority students in our courses.

I think one issue not that the humanities are seen as "unwelcoming" or "Eurocentric" but rather that the humanities (and pre-modern humanities, especially) are see as not "practical" or relevant to many undergraduates. Many of the highly motivated minority students end up pursuing professional tracks like business, medicine, social work, etc. b/c they feel they can contribute more to their own communities through those endeavors.

Maybe the key is to play up the 'real' skills that such humanities courses can teach: critical thinking, writing skills, etc. ? I don't know what the answer is myself...

[tenured_feminist]

Can you crosslist courses with Ethnic/Africana/Latino/Asian Studies?  That's a real shot in the arm if so.

I worked at a campus like this and a lot depended on word of mouth.  If you can get a few active folks in your classroom and they feel like you do a good job of teaching and mentoring minority students, you could develop a following even if you're not teaching courses with buzz words in the title.

If you have a McNair Scholars program, try checking in to see if they need more faculty mentors.  This can be a good way to connect with minority students but also economically disadvantaged students.

Is the faculty in your discipline all white?  Students of color in universities like yours where the numbers are low will often try a course with a faculty person of color even if it's not in their area of interest.

[acrimone]

Dear BFD,

The problem with explicitly multicultural curricula (on a university-wide level) that include classes that focus on just about everything under the sun is that it allows for intellectual ghettoism.

You're seeing the results.  Why should students bother to take your class when they can take something "relevant to them"?  And why shouldn't they take only things "relevant to them" when the professoriate is bending over backwards to make sure that they say it's important?

[tenured_feminist]

See from your post that you do have a diverse faculty -- sorry to have missed that.

While we might have deeper disagreements about the value of a multicultural curriculum, I suspect that Acrimone might be on to something.  How are your requirements structured -- if it's a menu system, how constrained are the choices?

[helpful]

The undergraduate population at my school is reported as (approx):
      Black non-Hispanic: 5%
      American Indian or Alaskan Native: 1%
      Asian or Pacific Islander: 4%
      Hispanic:   2%

And what are the rest called? "Normal'?

Wouldn't the rest also be categorized as

English x %
Irish x%
German x%

???

[acrimone]

While we might have deeper disagreements about the value of a multicultural curriculum, I suspect that Acrimone might be on to something. 

That's one of the nicest things anyone's every said to me.  Thank you.

[prytania3]

A lot of minority students take more career-focused programs--like business, engineering, nursing--things that are more, how shall I say, definite than the humanities. Anyway, your school so sorely lacks diversity that you really shouldn't worry about it. Not blaming you, just the reality.

[sassafrass]

I'm just about to publish some research on this very issue--albeit from a UK context. Pry's got it right: minority ethnic students are more likely to go into degree programmes where there is a recognisable job at the end of it. In the UK that means: med/dental school, pharmacy, business (mostly accounting) and engineering. You get the drill.

I started this research because I was wondering why there were no black folks in my sociology classes.

It was fascinating doing this research because there are so many contradictory factors that influence a student's career path. But the biggest issue seems to be prestige and respectability. The family wants bragging rights. The kids want to make their parents happy, they want job security, a good pay packet and (this is of course the underlying issue) they want respect and a wee bit of power.

Who can blame these students? So now when I'm doing recruiting I try to pitch my degree course in a different way and talk about the different types of jobs you can get from a degree in the social sciences.

[jackofallchem]

I sometimes think it is funny when people do research on a phenomenon that is old and well understood.  When a certain group of people has the opportunity to go to college for the first time, they go into fields that will get them well paying, highly(or at least moderately) respected jobs and they choose careers that they are at least casually familiar with.  When my father went to college, he (and many other people from machine-shop backgrounds) went into engineering because you could get a good job as an engineer.  They knew what engineers did and wanted jobs (and a lifestyle) like those of the engineers they saw.  They also wanted to be physicians and dentists because they saw the doctors and dentists in town and wanted jobs like that.

If you are the first one to go to college in your family, you probably aren't going to college to experiment or try new things.  You have a goal of doing something after college and you are going to college to achieve that goal. Many minority groups in college today seem to be the same as working-class white students in the 50's and 60's were in this respect.   

[hennypenny]

I sometimes think it is funny when people do research on a phenomenon that is old and well understood.  When a certain group of people has the opportunity to go to college for the first time, they go into fields that will get them well paying, highly(or at least moderately) respected jobs and they choose careers that they are at least casually familiar with. 

When my father went to college, he (and Many minority groups in college today seem to be the same as working-class white students in the 50's and 60's were in this respect.   

But with all due respect, this *isn't* well understood.  All we have is anecdotal evidence.  Very seldom does anyone ask students why they do what they do.

I see something missing in this thread.  If it were simply a case of 1st generation / blue collar kids going for well-paying careers, why do we have so many students of color going into such ill-paying (and often poorly regarded, shameful to say) fields as education or the ministry?

I was struck by Sassafrass's comment that there are few black folks in sociology in the UK.  In the US sociology and political science are among the few fields in the social sciences with balanced participation.  I want to echo Joey_fan's point that often students are looking for a field that is worthwhile, that benefits the communities from which they come--this logic explains both the pre-med student and the aspiring social worker.

my $0.02.

hp

[sassafrass]

Sorry, jack, but I gotta tell you, the relationship between 'race', ethnicity, employment, social mobility and education is incredibly complex and not very well understood here in the UK. In the US things are wee bit different but if you actually go and try to find hard evidence on the reasons why students choose one route of education over another or one career path over another this evidence (in the UK at least) does not exist.

You may think it's a simple as 'poor background = go to uni for more money' but the research I've done shows that the issues (unsurprisingly) are more complicated that one might imagine. If you control for class, you'll find ethnic minority students still don't go into the social sciences. If you control for gender, ethnic minority students are still missing. Why? What's the reason for this? In my small sample population there were a staggering array of issues that influenced their decision making process. It wasn't as simple as being poor or suffering from racism, because as we well know, those most likely to go to uni are from the middle and upper classes.

These students weren't the first to go to uni but 3rd generation middle class kids for whom the social sciences weren't even a consideration. This is fascinating stuff, methinks, and these issues are far from being 'old and well understood'.

[viaggiatore]

It seems the issue of relevance is most important. For students for whom money is the desired outcome of an education, the perceived relevance of humanities courses to the chosen field may be most important. For students whose choices of career options are shaped by their communities (i.e., prominent respected vocations generally include doctor, lawyer, businessperson, teacher, or minister), it may well be that "academic" has yet to achieve the prominence, and therefore relevance, of the other options. (Yes, I realize I'm presenting the humanities major mostly as a pipeline for academia). It is true that minorities historically have been and continue to be underrepresented in the academy, which naturally decreases the odds that many students might have grown up hearing about the humanities as a viable and relevant choice of career path OR as desirable elective course. If I understand the original post, it seems that the question regards the choice of courses, presumably including electives not necessarily related to the major.

The probably overly simplistic answer is twofold: First, be specific in course overviews and syllabi as to how a specific course is relevant to a well-rounded education (e.g., how literature can help shape a larger perspective that will be of use in a professional field). Second, ask the students what they think. If the general university course evaluations do not include questions specifically addressing the relevance/generality of course content and process to other fields, add your own. Ask your students (minority and non-minority) to give feedback as to how the course might be made more relevant to non-majors, or how they found the content generalized to their other interests. In my field, it always is our hope that the large intro courses will spark an interest in the field in students who otherwise never considered such a major.

Finally, although it's pretty obvious when there is an absence of minority faces in a class, also remember that less noticeable is the huge percentage of non-minority students who never take humanities courses, either, probably for the same reasons.

[booknerd]

I proudly teach writing courses at the VHRU (the old R1 designation) with the highest percentage of under-represented minorities in the U.S.  What I've seen in my own classrooms echoes this phenomenon.  I have a much larger contingent of non-white students in my technical writing classes (a course known for its "practicality" and a prerequisite in many professional degree programs) and very few in my creative writing classes.

I agree that this is in large part due to community/family expectations, whether or not the student is first, second, or third generation college attendee.  I am a first generation student myself from a long blue-collar backround and I started my educational path with the goal of attaining a doctorate in English.  So the first gen theory doesn't work for me. 

I agree with viaggiatore that being a scholar just isn't something that many communities, regardless of race, see as a viable career path.  My parents are very supportive but still worry about my ability to support my family while I finish my dissertation, though that has never been a problem for me. Believe me, I'd love nothing more than to see young people walking around wearing Cornell West t-shirts and listening to podcasts of Noam Chomsky, but that isn't the culture they are inundated with for the first eighteen years of their lives. 

I have no insight into this, which is why I applaude sassafrass.  But I do know it's not a simple issue.

[acrimone]

Just apropos of the ethnicity thing...

When I announced I was going to lawschool, my dear old grandmother said, and I quote:

"You already went to four years more school than you needed to, why are you going to go for three more?"

I can only say that, much as it saddened me, it was probably best for her psychic well-being that she was dead by the time I started pursuing my doctorate.