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

By BEN GOSE
From the issue dated September 28, 2007

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.
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