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

Results often fall short of ambitions, but nobody's giving up

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By BEN GOSE

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.

Their intentions often exceeded the results, although the special efforts at Virginia Tech and Harvard began later, and their final effects are not yet apparent. "This is not an issue that is going to be resolved by one initiative," says Peter Lange, Duke's provost. "It requires a lot of vigilance. If you take your eye off the ball, you run the risk that you'll fall behind."

Duke, Michigan, and Wisconsin adopted plans in the late 1980s and early 90s that focused primarily on minority faculty members. Virginia Tech began pushing hard in the late 1990s to add more minority professors and women, spurred by an assistant dean who introduced what some critics on the campus saw as extraordinary — and unfair — hiring preferences based on race. Harvard vowed in 2005 to spend $50-million to recruit and support female and underrepresented minority faculty members, after comments by its then-president, Lawrence H. Summers, that many believed were derogatory to female scientists.

Asian-American faculty members are mentioned in some of the plans, but the emphasis has been primarily on black, Hispanic, and American Indian professors, who are greatly underrepresented on the faculties of the five institutions.

In many ways, the three older plans now have the feel of a different era. It is rare today to see institutions setting specific numerical goals for minority faculty positions, as Duke, Michigan, and Wisconsin did to some extent. (Wisconsin pledged to double the number of its underrepresented faculty members, and Michigan wanted its proportion of minority professors to more closely mirror the makeup of minority residents in the state and nation by the year 2000).

Universities have plenty of reasons for using less-specific language in describing their diversity efforts today. Challenges to affirmative action became widespread in the 1990s, both in the court system and through state referenda. Campus officials realize that numerical goals could be seen as quotas.

Some provosts, meanwhile, say such goals aren't as necessary today as they were in the 1980s, because a greater percentage of faculty members have bought into the idea that diversity is a worthy goal. Others say the rationale for a diverse faculty is more nuanced today, more about creating the right atmosphere for learning than counting heads.

"Putting a number out there assumes that the goal is to get a certain number of one color versus a certain number of another color," says Patrick V. Farrell, provost at Wisconsin, which has no numerical goals in its latest plan for diversifying the faculty. "What we're actually trying to do is create an environment in which students come away with the best education they can get, and that does require a diverse faculty."

Another reason for not posting a number, of course, is that things don't always work out. Duke started its first broad-based plan to recruit black faculty members in 1988, promising to add at least one additional black professor in each of its 56 academic departments within five years. But five years later, the plan had fallen well short: Duke had a net increase of only five black professors, according to a Chronicle article published at the time.

At Wisconsin the number of black faculty members, while up considerably from 1988, when its "Madison Plan" began, has dropped to 51 from 60 in the past six years.

Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, says the decision by some institutions to set numerical goals in the late 1980s may have emanated from a belief that good intentions would lead to success. "Maybe we were more than a little idealistic back at that time in our beliefs that because we knew it was the right thing, … it would just happen," she says.

Throughout academe, efforts to recruit more-diverse faculties have achieved only mixed success, according to statistics from the U.S. Education Department.

In 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 16.5 percent of the nation's full-time professors were from minority groups, up from 12.7 percent a decade earlier. But minority professors held only 12.4 percent of full professorships in 2005. Women, meanwhile, made up 50 percent of the full-time professoriate but held only a quarter of full professorships.

In terms of actual numbers, minority scholars have made better progress: 109,964 of them held full-time jobs in 2005, up from 69,505 in 1995, an increase of 58 percent. But the professoriate as a whole grew during that period, and the increase in the proportion of minority scholars lagged well behind the increase in the total number of faculty members.

"Despite significant and in some cases heroic efforts to diversify the faculty, our goals still are far from being reached," says Ms. Broad.

Leaders of the five universities in this analysis attribute some of their challenges to "pipeline" constraints: Not enough minority candidates, they argue, are earning Ph.D.'s and choosing to pursue academic careers.

But national data show that the pipeline has, in fact, opened up. The number of minority Ph.D. recipients rose 45 percent during the decade ending in 2006, a period when the number of white Ph.D. recipients dropped 11 percent, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is sponsored by several federal agencies. Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students all now earn a much higher percentage of the Ph.D.'s awarded annually than they did 20 years ago.

Here's how the plans for recruiting minority faculty have played out at four of the five institutions. (See related article on Michigan, the fifth institution.)

Duke U.: Success rates vary by discipline

The black faculty Strategic Initiative began in 1993, on the heels of the failed effort to add at least one black professor to every department.

As of the fall of 2007, Duke had 62 tenured or tenure-track black professors, accounting for 4.5 percent of the faculty. But while the raw number is double that of 20 years ago, it masks tremendous variation within the university. Black professors remain rare in the law school, which has one black professor, the business school, with two, and the natural sciences, with three.

Karla FC Holloway, an English professor who served as dean of humanities and social sciences from 1999 to 2005, says each unit of the university should be held accountable for its record on diversity. "There has been growth in arts and social sciences, and medicine, but in some ways that growth has arguably allowed other schools or divisions not to work as aggressively with this effort," she says.

Mr. Lange, the provost, concedes that some parts of the university have fallen short. He says he is working closely on the issue with the law school's dean, David F. Levi, and other officials. "They have made offers and have not been successful at times," Mr. Lange says. "They're putting in a lot of effort to do better."

Duke makes sure that when black job applicants visit the campus, they meet other black faculty members — and not just potential colleagues in the department to which they're applying. The university also is taking small steps to widen the pipeline. Duke has financed two postdoctoral positions for minority candidates each year, with the hope that it will eventually hire some of them for tenure-track faculty positions.

In 2003, Duke started yet another faculty initiative related to diversity — but this time the scope was expanded to include women and all underrepresented minority groups. "We needed to recognize that diversity had come to include a substantially broader set of concerns," Mr. Lange says.

Ms. Holloway worries that the broader focus may give deans and department chairs an out: "People can say, 'I've hired enough women, and that makes up for the lack of minorities.'"

Harvard U.: Uneven progress on racial diversity

Harvard created an office of faculty development and diversity, to be headed by a senior vice provost, in 2005, shortly after announcing that it would spend $50-million to help diversify the faculty.

In the more than three years since that commitment, the university has made modest progress in diversifying its faculty, and some professors believe that the new office deserves some of the credit. Kay Kaufman Shelemay, a professor of music and of African and African-American studies, says the office has done a good job compiling statistics related to diversity and working with deans and department chairs to ensure that they cast a wider net in their searches. "There is no doubt that the office established by former President Summers both invigorated and centralized our institutional efforts," Ms. Shelemay says.

Women now make up 16 percent of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the natural sciences, up from 12 percent in 2004-5. In the humanities, 32 percent of the professors are women, up from 30 percent, and in the social sciences, 31 percent are women, up from 28 percent.

The changes for the professional schools over that period varied — law, engineering, and government all saw significant gains for women, while the proportion of female faculty members actually dropped in the schools of divinity, dentistry, and education.

The university's progress on racial diversity, meanwhile, has been uneven. More than 6 percent of the tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the social sciences are black, but black professors make up 1 percent or less of faculty members in the natural sciences and the humanities. Hispanic professors make up no more than 2 percent of faculty members in each of those three areas.

In 2006, Harvard committed $7.5-million to improve child care on the campus — a primary concern of female faculty members. The university also just completed its third year of a summer program aimed in part at improving the pipeline for female and minority professors. The program allows undergraduates to spend 10 weeks in the research laboratories of science and engineering faculty members. More than half of the 400 participants have been women, and more than 60 percent have been minority students.

Judith D. Singer, a professor of education who became senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity in June, says she was willing to take on the job because the climate "feels different" under Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's first female president. But Ms. Singer acknowledges that progress has been uneven among departments and divisions.

"Addressing issues of diversity remains a challenge throughout higher education," she says. "We at Harvard, like our peer institutions, must do better."

U. of Wisconsin at Madison: Progress in fits and starts

The university undertook its Madison Plan in 1988, vowing to double the number of black, Hispanic, and American Indian professors by adding 70 new faculty members within three years.

Progress has come in fits and starts. A Wisconsin official told The Chronicle in 1995 that the university hadn't made the progress it had hoped for. The number of tenured or tenure-track black professors, for example, increased only 61 percent, to 37, in that seven-year span. The total then surged to 60 by 2001, only to stall. Over the six years ending in 2007, the number of black professors dropped to 51.

Mr. Farrell, the provost, argues that part of the challenge is increased competition. While institutions like Wisconsin were among the first to spell out ambitious plans to diversify the faculty, now almost every institution has one. "We compete with everybody else for the pool that exists," he says.

Damon A. Williams, who became vice provost for diversity and climate in August, says Wisconsin and other universities must seek out minority job candidates more aggressively. For example, he wants to see Madison recruit aggressively at the annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, sponsored by the Southern Regional Educational Board and attended by hundreds of minority Ph.D. candidates.

"We have to be visible and present at that meeting and be willing to sell ourselves to them," he says.

Wisconsin's record with Hispanic and American Indian faculty members has been stronger. The university had 77 Hispanic professors in 2007, up from 53 in 1998, and 13 American Indian professors, up from four in 1998.

The growth of American Indian studies — in a state that is home to several Indian tribes — has helped attract new American Indian professors to the campus, Mr. Farrell says. "Professors who visit say, 'OK, here's a place where people from our background can thrive, fit in, and have success.'"

Still, Wisconsin and other universities must persuade more minority undergraduates to pursue academic careers, the provost says. The engineering school has developed a fellowship program, aimed primarily at minority graduate students, that encourages them to pursue research immediately. That program is being copied by the College of Letters and Science.

"When students spend their first year or two just on class work," Mr. Farrell says, "they find graduate school is not nearly as interesting as they thought it would be."

Virginia Tech: A bigger faculty role in hiring

The university made an extraordinary effort to diversify its campus starting in the late 1990s, and it paid off: During the three years ending in 2002, the number of black tenured and tenure-track professors in the College of Arts and Sciences rose by more than 50 percent, to 17; the number of Hispanic professors more than doubled, to seven; and the proportion of female professors rose from 20.6 percent to 23.6 percent.

Myra Gordon, an associate dean who left Virginia Tech in 2002, was the architect of the plan. At the time, faculty members complained that she had essentially taken over their role of hiring new professors.

Mark G. McNamee, the provost since 2001, says that while the university remains strongly committed to diversifying the faculty, some of the tactics that were criticized have been reined in or eliminated. Now he and the deans offer input at beginning of the process but for the most part let faculty members have the final say in hiring.

"It was a much more centrally controlled process at the time," Mr. McNamee says. "The deans are still engaged and have responsibilities, but they're not perceived as unduly influencing what the outcome is going to be."

It is difficult to evaluate progress in the College of Arts and Sciences since then, because it was divided into smaller colleges several years ago. Over the four years ending in 2007, the university had a net increase of five black and five Hispanic professors. Black faculty members make up about 3 percent of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate, Hispanic faculty members less than 2 percent, and women 24.3 percent.

In 2006 students protested the university's decision not to grant tenure to a black professor known for his activism on affirmative action and other causes. Mr. McNamee promised to establish a committee to study the role of race at the university. "When someone doesn't get tenure, that doesn't help us, but that's just the way it is sometimes," he says now.

In August the committee released a plan that calls for a cluster of six new hires in Africana studies and race and social policy.

Virginia Tech also frequently invites professors from historically black universities to deliver lectures on the campus, in part to elevate awareness of the university among those lecturers.

"Once people know Virginia Tech," says Mr. McNamee, "they really like it a lot better than they think they're going to like it."