Universities need more black faculty members

Affirmative action is needed to ensure minorities gain their fare share of job opportunities in all occupations.

More than five decades after the passage of the first Civil Rights Act by Congress, black faculty ranks remain abysmally low in colleges and universities.

Although the laws and customs that maintained a separation between blacks and whites have disappeared, blacks still do not enjoy equal status when seeking employment in the academic world.

Two decades ago, black faculty employment was approximately 2 percent in the majority of colleges and universities. According to the latest data of the National Center for Education Statistics, in fall 2013, 43 percent of college faculty were white males, 35 percent white females, but only 3 percent black males, and 3 percent black females. Hispanics, now the largest minority in the country, are even fewer in college faculty positions than blacks.

States that are considered liberal do not have higher percentages of black college professors than southern states.

According to an article in the Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2015, “among the top-tier state and private universities, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, reported the highest percentage of black faculty at 6.8 percent.” The Post statistics are from a 2007 study, apparently the most recent such study available, in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

If the above study’s forecast is correct, “it will take about a century and a half for the percentage of African-American faculty to reach parity with the percentage of blacks in the nation’s population.”

A closer look at the data reveals that black faculty are far more likely to teach in historically black colleges and universities in the South than in predominantly white colleges and universities in the Northeast. More than 90 percent of the tenured black faculty are in historically black institutions of higher education.

It is not surprising that many blacks prefer to teach in black colleges. What is surprising is that affirmative action guidelines developed over the past five decades have not produced significant changes.

While many people feel that affirmative action has resulted in reverse discrimination and enhanced the position of blacks in seeking employment at the expense of white males, that is not true of college faculty positions.

Affirmative action works best when job opportunities are increasing. When the share of jobs is declining as is the case with full time college teaching positions, groups divided by race, ethnicity, and gender must compete, producing disappointment. The disappointment of blacks is understandable, especially because the supply of black Ph.D.s has increased.

Despite unwanted results produced by declining teaching positions, affirmative action is needed to ensure that minorities gain their fare share of job opportunities in all occupations.

Black students need to see more black faculty as role models. More black faculty at Ph.D.-granting institutions are also needed to mentor black graduate students.

Since blacks historically experienced discrimination for a long time, they receive greater attention than other minorities in affirmative action discussions on faculty hiring. These discussions, however, have so far yielded few noteworthy results.