Colleges have promised for years to do more to expand the number of Black faculty members in their ranks. The numbers are stark. While 14 percent of undergraduate students are Black, only 6 percent of full-time faculty members are. The National Science Foundation reports that the percentage of total doctorates awarded to Black students increased by only one percentage point from 2006 to 2016, to 7 percent. The data suggest that it will be a long time before faculties look like the rest of America.
At institutions across the country, faculty members have increasingly indicated that they aren’t willing to wait. At the University of Kentucky, the program in African American and Africana studies sent a letter to the president calling for an increase in Black instructors from their current 3.7 percent of the faculty to 15 percent, reflecting the Black population of Lexington, Ky. Similarly, at Georgia State University, which has about 54,000 students, more than 200 Black faculty members signed a letter advocating for better representation.
The good news is that colleges have shown a willingness to take meaningful steps. At our university, for example, the president announced the formation of a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence. George Mason, for whom the university is named, enslaved more than 100 people, so dealing with this issue is long overdue. One charge to the task force is to establish equity advisers in every academic department. Among their responsibilities is to “participate in faculty recruiting by approving search-committee shortlists and strategies, and raising awareness of best practices.”
Individual efforts like that are important, but our goal in higher education should be to increase the number of Black faculty members over all, not just at our own institutions. Given the minimal increases in the number of new doctoral degrees awarded to Black men and women, as well as the lack of any meaningful growth in the number of Black assistant professors, this goal will never be realized. If we are recruiting Black faculty members for one campus merely by pursuing them on other campuses, overall numbers will not change. We’re only robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So how can a college increase its number of Black faculty members without depleting the pool of minority educators at other institutions? We offer the following approaches.
First, institutions should reform their recruitment and retention methods. That means no longer relying on familiar networks or limiting hires to candidates with elite pedigrees. The College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University has found success with cluster hiring — the practice of hiring multiple faculty members across disciplines around common research topics. The university has increased its number of faculty members from historically excluded backgrounds threefold since the hiring program began, in 2016.
Following Emory’s lead, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced a plan in 2020 to hire 20 tenured and tenure-track faculty members through 2024 as part of an antiracism initiative based on cluster hiring. The university will hire scholars of color in different fields to collaborate in applying interdisciplinary approaches to dismantling racism. Similarly, in 2020, the University of California at San Diego said it would hire 12 new faculty members as part of an interdisciplinary cluster to increase diversity.
More colleges should pursue strategies like that, while thinking of creative ways to work with government agencies to achieve recruitment goals. Two years ago, the National Institutes of Health announced a $241-million program to help a dozen universities and medical schools attract diverse faculty members over the next nine years. The program aims to build institutional capacity to select and retain world-class, interdisciplinary talent as a cohort rather than relying on ad hoc faculty replacements, as in traditional faculty recruitment. Such large, targeted investments have the potential to make a noticeable impact.
Second, colleges should expand the pipeline of minority faculty members by increasing financial and professional-development support for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from minority communities. Providing incentives to pursue doctoral studies as well as dedicated professional mentoring can help build the next generation of diverse faculty members.
Third, colleges should reinvest in themselves by creating antiracist interdisciplinary-research centers and programs. They should hire dedicated faculty members to develop and direct them, and recruit diverse Ph.D. students and postdocs to conduct research and promote outreach. Through such professional-development, leadership, and networking opportunities, institutions can create an inclusive culture while supporting the academic and professional success of their Black faculty members, postdocs, and graduate students.
Finally, universities should award funding to their colleges and departments based on those programs’ success in recruiting, retaining, and promoting Black faculty members. This is important because a dearth of Black faculty members may signal to students that their representation does not matter, which may harm student retention and the institution’s financial security.
Any efforts to expand the number of Black faculty members must go hand in hand with similar efforts for Black students, as well as efforts to improve the atmosphere in which they work. As difficult as it is to face those issues, now is the time. We do not want to find out, years later, that our attempts today to improve higher education’s diversity for future generations were too modest to make a real difference.
