Talent for the Frontiers

If there’s the will, there’s a way to open up the nation’s university faculties to more minorities and women over the next 10 years. Many older faculty members will be retiring in that period, and they must be replaced. But is there the will in academia and government to change the mix on faculties? The evidence says not yet.

In California and nationally, university and college faculties are about 90% white. Asians, blacks, Latinos and other minorities share the remaining 10%. Women do better than minorities, with their numbers growing steadily to 27.3% of faculty jobs across the country, but growth has been infinitesimal at the full-professor level; women hold only 10.7% of those positions.

For minorities, the outlook is especially grim because fewer blacks and Latinos are enrolling in college, so the pool of potential faculty members is shrinking. Many colleges increased their minority enrollments in the 1960s and early 1970s, but did too little to make certain that they stayed in school. Now many students are unwilling to take on enormous loans to attend college; those who do graduate are often unmoved by pleas to be college teachers when the outside world offers better opportunities.

A massive effort is especially needed to prepare more minority students for college, help them stay there, and entice them into teaching. For women, the action must focus on graduate-school recruitment and support as well as on more aggressive faculty recruitment and help toward gaining tenure in a largely male world.

There are some projects under way, but not nearly enough. The Ford Foundation has reinstituted a program of special minority fellowships providing 50 annual grants of $12,000 per student for three years. It received 900 applications for those 50 spots. The National Science Foundation sponsors a similar program, as does a consortium of the University of Chicago and the Big 10 universities. The Michigan Legislature voted this summer to spend $2.6 million to help colleges recruit minority students and faculty members. The Cal State system spends $1 million on grants to help women and minority students complete their dissertations or do other research to advance their careers. UC has similar programs, although the governor has not approved even the modest increases that UC has requested.

The losers, in addition to well-educated minorities and women who do not find university jobs, are the students. In general, the students don’t benefit from the diversity of backgrounds that they would encounter from a better-balanced faculty, and minority and women students specifically don’t see people like themselves in front of the classroom and helping make faculty decisions. Society loses, of course, because not all of its talent is used to advance the frontiers of knowledge.