The Professoriate Is Increasingly Diverse, but That Didn't Happen by Accident

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By BEN GOSE

Fifteen years ago, H. Rika Houston was on track to earn an M.B.A. from California State University at Long Beach and was preparing to look for a new job in the corporate world. But one of her professors set her on a different course when he called her into his office and told her: "I think you're doctorate material."

David A. Horne, a professor of marketing, agreed to "sponsor" Ms. Houston, who is Afro-Asian, in a Cal State program that repays up to $30,000 in graduate-school loans for Ph.D. seekers if they teach at a Cal State campus after earning their doctorate. Nearly 70 percent of the participants in the systemwide program are minority scholars.

Through that program, Cal State at Los Angeles has hired 32 faculty members over nearly 20 years, including Ms. Houston, an associate professor of marketing who joined the faculty after earning a Ph.D. at the University of California at Irvine. (The Cal State system itself has few doctorate-level programs.) Those hires, and other efforts to recruit minority professors, have helped Cal State at Los Angeles assemble one of the most diverse faculties in the country. As of the fall of 2005, the latest year for which national data are available, nearly 40 percent of its full-time professors were from racial and ethnic minority groups.

Ms. Houston is one of the faces behind national statistics that show that the professoriate is becoming more and more diverse.

"I can't say enough about the loan-forgiveness program," says Ms. Houston, who says she could not have otherwise afforded graduate school. "I'm looking forward to a time when I can sponsor someone."

In 2005, 109,964 U.S. minority scholars held full-time faculty positions at American colleges and universities, up from 69,505 in 1995, according to the Education Department — a 58-percent increase. The proportion of minority scholars in the overall professoriate also rose, but not as much. The department found that 16.5 percent of scholars were from minority groups in 2005, up from 12.7 percent in 1995. The increase in the proportion of U.S. minority scholars lagged well behind the increase in raw numbers because the number of white and nonresident-alien scholars also rose during the decade. The department includes both U.S. citizens and resident aliens (noncitizens who are permanent residents) in its racial categories, but lists nonresident aliens separately.

Hispanics and Asians experienced the greatest percentage growth: Some 22,818 Hispanics and 48,457 Asians held full-time faculty positions in 2005, both up at least 75 percent from 1995. The growth over that decade for American Indians and black scholars was slightly lower: Some 35,458 black scholars had full-time positions in 2005 (up by nearly a third from 1995), as did 3,231 American Indians (a 50-percent increase).

Proponents of greater faculty diversity say they are pleased to see those increases, especially during a decade filled with numerous challenges to affirmative action. But some experts on faculty diversity thought the numbers would increase even more, given the expectation that faculty members hired in the 1950s and 1960s — the vast majority of whom were white men — would begin retiring and make way for a more-diverse group.

Those retirements took longer than expected but are now beginning to occur, though there are concerns that some tenure-track positions are being replaced by part-time and adjunct slots. In a study of 28 private institutions in California, Daryl G. Smith, a professor of education and psychology at Claremont Graduate University, found that the average institution replaced between 25 percent and 40 percent of its faculty over the most recent five-year period. Those trends are leading to a robust round of hiring around the country, she says.

"The next 10 years are crucial," Ms. Smith says. "If we don't make substantial progress on diversity, we'll have missed a real window because we'll have replaced another generation of faculty across the country."

The tables presented in this issue are based on data collected by the Education Department every other year. All institutions that participate in federal financial-aid programs are required to take part in the survey, known as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS.

The overall totals at each institution mask great variation by field. Minority Americans are earning large numbers of doctorates in certain fields, but are all but absent from others. For example, American Indians, blacks, and Hispanics earned more than 860 doctorates in the field of educational research and administration in 2004, but only six in astronomy, 22 in physics, and 29 in mathematics, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is sponsored by several federal agencies.

While much has been written about elite institutions' "buying" diversity by offering high salaries to minority professors from other institutions, many colleges and universities, like Cal State at Los Angeles, are also engaged in serious efforts to expand the pipeline of minority scholars entering academe, particularly in fields where they are most underrepresented.

Columbia University, for example, is investing $500,000 in a pilot program to expose a diverse group of recent college graduates, including those from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, to Ph.D.-level work in the sciences. The program will pay participants to work as research assistants in laboratories for two years after graduation, allowing them to interact on a daily basis with Ph.D. candidates and professors. The program will also help participants develop strong applications for doctoral programs. Columbia hopes the program will evolve into a consortium involving other institutions in the New York area.

"This is a way of giving people the opportunity to try it out, without making the kinds of commitments that a Ph.D. student makes," says Geraldine Downey, Columbia's vice provost for diversity initiatives.

Columbia already has one of the most-diverse faculties in the Ivy League. Minority-group members made up 21 percent of the full-time faculty, according to the 2005 data. The university has hired 17 new minority and female scholars in the arts and sciences over the past three years through a special $15-million fund to increase faculty diversity that was announced in 2005. Eleven of the new hires are African-American or Latino, according to Ms. Downey.

Other institutions are also trying to "grow their own" in a bid to increase faculty diversity. The University of North Carolina at Pembroke was founded in 1887 to educate American Indian teachers, and roughly a quarter of its current students are American Indian (mostly from the local Lumbee Tribe). About 5 percent of its full-time professors and 10 percent of its adjunct faculty members are American Indian, but competition for the tiny national pool of new American Indian Ph.D.'s is so fierce that Pembroke is often outbid, according to Charles F. Harrington, the institution's provost.

Pembroke has responded by cultivating the American Indian students already on its campus. Several master's-degree students have been hired as adjunct or part-time faculty members, and the university provides flexible schedules and information about a state financial-aid program so that the new hires can work toward a Ph.D.

Enrollment is rising at Pembroke, and the university has added nearly 40 new tenure-track faculty slots in the past two years. It hopes to add another 20 in 2008. That makes Mr. Harrington optimistic that the university can achieve his ambitious goal of having minority professors account for 25 percent to 33 percent of the faculty within five years. Minority scholars made up 15 percent of the full-time faculty in 2005.

"We've made great strides," Mr. Harrington says, "but we need to do much more."

Ms. Smith and other scholars have charted the high rates of turnover among minority faculty members, prompting an increasing number of colleges to put renewed focus on hiring the right professors and working hard to retain them. Desdemona Cardoza, the new provost at Cal State at Los Angeles, says that during her previous position, as dean of the College of Natural and Social Sciences, she interviewed every person applying for a faculty position. She wanted to make sure that they understood the student-focused mission of Cal State, where teaching comes before research, and that they weren't looking to flee at the first opportunity to the University of California, which has a greater focus on research.

Many experts say developing a diverse faculty is an important recruiting tool in drawing minority students, but Ms. Cardoza has found that the opposite is also true. At her campus, 52 percent of students are Hispanic. "We've become a very attractive campus to Hispanic faculty that are highly sought after because they're interested in coming to a place where the majority of the students are Hispanic," Ms. Cardoza says.

Diversity feeds on itself, but that's no consolation to colleges that have yet to build a critical mass of minority faculty members. Wesleyan College, a women's college in Georgia, did not list any minority faculty members in the 2005 data. Instead, all of its 47 full-time professors were listed under the "race unknown" category. Susan Welsh, the college's director of communication, says the institution had at least one black professor in 2005 and now has three minority professors — two blacks and one Asian-American — in a full-time faculty of 52.

Given the college's niche, it may in prior years have put more emphasis on attracting women than on attracting a racially diverse faculty, Ms. Welsh says. More than 60 percent of its professors are women. Now, increasing racial diversity is a high priority and is one of the seven goals in the college's strategic plan. But attracting minority candidates to the campus is a struggle, she says, given that the average full-time professor at Wesleyan makes about $55,000 per year.

"Our salaries are not competitive," Ms. Welsh says, "and there is such demand for minority professors and Ph.D. candidates."

Some of the most diverse faculties in the country are at community colleges. Minority professors account for 52 percent of the full-time faculty at Miami Dade College, 40 percent in the Houston Community College system, and 30 percent at the Community College of Denver. Given their focus on serving local communities, it makes sense that colleges in diverse cities would also have plenty of diversity on their faculties.

But another factor is that minority scholars earn a higher proportion of the master's degrees (24 percent) awarded to U.S. citizens and resident aliens than they do of the Ph.D.'s awarded (21 percent). Philo A. Hutcheson, an associate professor of educational-policy studies at Georgia State University, notes that a master's is an appropriate credential for teaching at most community colleges, but not at many four-year institutions.

"That means community colleges have a more diverse pool to draw from," Mr. Hutcheson says.