Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Diversifying Higher Ed Still a Challenge

By Autumn A. Arnett, Diverse Issues in Higher Education

In the 1990s, many institutions made a concerted e­ffort to hire more Black faculty members. The universities were propelled by a number of civil rights lawsuits in higher education whose outcomes mandated swift action by states to remedy the effects of segregation in higher education and by White House guidelines reaffirming the need for affirmative action. These schools, including Duke University and the University of Michigan, sought intentionally to recruit faculty of color to their ranks.

However, 20 years later, though there has been an increase in the number of non-White faculty members overall, National Center for Education Statistics data show that increase has primarily been among Asian faculty members. The percentage of Black professors on campus has increased only incrementally, while the number of Native American faculty has remained consistent over the last 20 years. (Female professors, however, have seen consistent, though modest, increases across all ethnicities.)

Read the story here.

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