How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? Search Here

The push to get the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones has shined a spotlight on a particular group of scholars: Black female professors with tenure.

Their numbers are few. At public and private nonprofit four-year colleges in the fall of 2019 — the most recent year for which federal data are available — there were 251,921 tenured associate and full professors. Of those, 5,221, or 2.1 percent, were Black women.

At Chapel Hill, where Hannah-Jones is slated to begin a five-year fixed-term appointment this fall, 3.1 percent — or 31 — of the institution’s 998 tenured professors in 2019 were Black women.

At other public flagships, the share of Black female tenured professors was much lower. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor had 1.5 percent, and the University of California at Berkeley had 1.3 percent. At the University of Connecticut and the University of Missouri at Columbia, the share of Black female tenured professors was less than 1 percent.

Below is a searchable, sortable table of colleges and the percent of faculty members who were at each institution in 2019. It is based on self-reported data for people who are Black or African American, but not those who are of two or more races, who are nonresident aliens, or whose race is unknown.