4 Steps Toward Making Endowed Positions More Equal

T he widespread use of endowed-chair positions to recruit and retain faculty members has been well documented in academe. These prestigious appointments, highly valued by professors and institutions, are often the highest honor that colleges can bestow. They frequently come with more pay, more resources, and more influence. Unfortunately there is evidence that they are not being occupied equally by all groups.

Earlier this year, I led a study that analyzed the makeup of endowed chairs and distinguished professors in departments and colleges of education. We found that these positions were largely being filled with older white males who had attended elite graduate schools. While all minorities were underrepresented to some degree, women were greatly underrepresented.

For example, Hispanics earn 6.5 percent of doctorates in education but hold just 3 percent of endowed chairs; African-Americans earn 13.4 percent of doctorates in education but hold just 11.4 percent of endowed chairs; and Asian-Americans earn 5 percent of doctorates in education but hold just 2.3 percent of education endowed chairs. Most striking, however, is that women earn 70 percent of doctorates in education but make up only 40 percent of endowed chairs in the field.

These numbers indicate that faculty members and administrators need to do a better job of diversifying the highest level of academe — particularly when it comes to women. Research has found that women more often must leave their institutions to get an endowed chair, while men more often receive them for retention purposes. What will be required to make a change at the top of the faculty ladder?

First, white, male endowed professors will have to be an active part of the process. Correcting the individual disparities that we see in endowed positions requires their intervention because closed networks maintain the status quo in higher education — like hiring like. This means that men will have to advocate for the hiring of internal and external female candidates for endowed positions.

Second, women and professors of color who hold endowed positions must speak out about their own experiences. What experiences were formative to their professional and career development? Who mentored them and how? Recent scholarship by African-American endowed faculty members illustrates that the paths to becoming an endowed professor for women and people of color are manifold. Professors everywhere know how navigating the academy is difficult work, but those who are underrepresented in their disciplines have an even more acute awareness.

Third, early mentorship programs should be established to improve the pipeline. Currently work is being done that advocates for earlier and more focused mentorship when it comes to developing future faculty members of color. For example, the RISE for Boys and Men of Color’s Grad Prep Academy is a national project that prepares undergraduate men of color for doctoral study and research-related careers in five fields: education, health, human services and social policy, juvenile and criminal justice, and work-force development. By focusing on minorities, the academy helps men of diverse backgrounds gain social and professional mentorship and create social ties that will help them be successful researchers.

Earlier recruitment of undergraduate students will potentially build up the pool of diverse graduate students, which helps equalize a racist and sexist pipeline. Research has found that this pipeline is most effective when it begins at preschool. As the pool of diverse Ph.D.s continues to grow, and with the right mentorship, more professors will be eligible to become endowed.

Finally, institutions should be using endowed chairs as a tool for diversifying. One example is Murray State University, which uses its Ashland Oil College of Education Endowed Professorship to “augment and support the salary and activities of a position within the College of Education to attract qualified African American candidates from the public schools.” Meanwhile, other research-intensive universities are taking steps in the right direction. For example, in 2014, Roland Mitchell was named the Jo Ellen Levy Yates Endowed Professor in the School of Education at Louisiana State University. Mitchell is the first African-American to hold an endowed chair in the university’s school of education.

O ur research also showed a sign of progress on that minority front. For the highest-research-activity universities, the years between a person earning a Ph.D. and being named to a current endowed position were fairly uniform across race, but for all other institutions, there were significant differences in length of time, with whites having the most years and Asian-Americans having the least. This could indicate that these universities are making efforts to recruit more endowed professors of color.

But what about progress in terms of gender? Among universities with the highest research activity, women tended to have fewer years between earning a Ph.D. and being named to a current endowed position than did their same-race male counterparts. However, this pattern did not hold for all other institutions, wherein women tended to take more time to be named to an endowed chair than their same-race male counterparts did; the exception being white females, who took less time than white males.

Most people recognize that colleges need to hire more diverse professors as a demographic imperative: to right the imbalance and mismatch between those who teach and those who are taught. However, there is also a democratic imperative: Those in the academy should focus on getting more women and faculty of color in elite and influential professorships.

More research on endowed professorships is certainly warranted, but more is not needed to act. We can do that right now. As Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, in a recent op-ed reminded colleges that complain that there aren’t minorities in the faculty pipeline: We can make the pipeline. We can grow our own.

Nicholas D. Hartlep is an assistant professor of urban education at Metropolitan State University, in St. Paul. He is the co-editor, most recently, of Asian/Americans, Education, and Crime: The Model Minority as Victim and Perpetrator (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).