Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gose, Ben

Titel

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

Ist Teil von

• The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2008-09, Vol.55 (5), p.B.1

Ort / Verlag

Washington: Chronicle of Higher Education

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Quelle

ERIC

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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. This article revisited ambitious plans announced at five universities during the past two decades to see how they have fared. They are Duke University, Harvard University, Virginia Tech, and the Universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Wisconsin at Madison. 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. 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. This article discusses how the plans for recruiting minority faculty have played out at four institutions, namely Duke University, Harvard University, Virginia Tech, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.