As the U.S. celebrates Juneteenth as an official national holiday for the first time this year, a review of faculty at large public colleges and universities in the U.S. reveals a stark under-representation of Black academics.
The numbers
An analysis of Pennsylvania State University released earlier this spring found that only 3.1 percent of faculty members at the school’s campuses were Black, the same percentage for the past 20 years. And Penn State is hardly alone. Black academics hold few faculty positions at higher education institutions in the U.S. compared to the total number of Black Americans enrolled in undergraduate programs, according to a 2019 Pew Research analysis.
While Black students made up 14 percent of all college undergraduates at the time of the study, Black academics made up just 6 percent of faculty ranks. Overall, nonwhite students represented 45 percent of undergraduates and only 24 percent of faculty.
“Racial and ethnic diversity has increased among college faculty in the United States over the past two decades, but faculty are still much more likely than students to be white,” said the Pew study.
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This trend of under-representation can be seen across all of the Big 10 conference colleges. According to data published in the Washington Post, University of Maryland at College Park has the highest percentage of Black faculty in the conference, 6.2 percent, and University of Nebraska has the lowest, 2 percent. Most had between 4 to 4.7 percent Black faculty.
A study published this May by researchers from the University of Florida College of Medicine and the Department of Surgery at Virginia Commonwealth University found that “a disproportionately small number of faculty from minority groups obtain leadership positions in academic surgery.”
According to the study, women who are part of racial or ethnic minority groups may be more disadvantaged than men in the same field when it comes to obtaining leadership positions. The survey showed 15,653 total U.S. surgical faculty members, with just 3,876 women.
The Southern Regional Education Board has also found that a growing diversity in college student populations has not been matched by faculty numbers.
How did we get here?
If the student population is getting more diverse, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, why isn’t the faculty? There are several possible factors, including representation patterns, student loan debt, and work environment.
“Research has found that minority students who have educators of the same race or ethnicity are more likely to look to those teachers as role models and to report greater effort in school and higher college goals,” said the Pew analysis.
In addition, student loan costs may prevent Black students from pursuing higher degrees and therefore from pursuing faculty positions.
Black borrowers are some of the most impacted by student debt, CNBC reported earlier this year. National Center for Education Statistics indicate that Black and African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white graduates.
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When Black academics do take on faculty positions, they can also face different challenges than their white peers.
Members of the journalism faculty at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill were “irate” when Knight Chair scholar Nikole Hanna-Jones, a Black woman, was hired without tenure for unclear reasons this year, according to the Washington Post. Other Knight Chair scholars had been granted tenure in the past, the outlet said.
Surveys of the school’s Black faculty included in the Pennsylvania State University analysis showed that one out of eight said they had experienced racism there and nearly 68 percent said they had experienced racism within the past three years. Faculty said they have been called racist names by students and one told researchers that students complained every time they taught about slavery.