This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: U.S. colleges and universities have long struggled to increase the racial diversity of their faculty. And after being hired, some faculty of color say they feel that their qualifications and scholarship are subjected to greater scrutiny or that they do not feel valued by their colleagues and schools.
As a scholar of critical race theory, I have studied these barriers, and I think that it is helpful to understand what universities, students and academic research all stand to gain from a more diverse faculty. While college faculties have become more racially diverse since the 1970s, the diversification of the faculty has not kept pace with changes in the college student population. Overall, approximately 16% of the U.S. population were people of color in 1970.
In 1975, approximately 8% of full-time faculty at U.S. colleges and universities were people of color. Approximately 4% were Black, 2% were Asian and 1% were Hispanic. In 1976, meanwhile, nearly 16% of U.S. college students were people of color.
Black students specifically accounted for about 9% of all full-time college students in 1976, Hispanic students about 4% and Asian or Pacific Islander students about 2%. By 2022, 72% of full-time faculty across universities and colleges nationwide were white, while Asian professors made up 13%, Black professors 7% and Hispanic professors 6%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By 2022, Hispanic students accounted for 21.5% of U.S.-resident students at colleges and universities, Black students 13.2% and Asian students 7.8%.
Overall, in 2022, people of color made up approximately 41% of the U.S. population. Diversifying college faculties has not been a straightforward journey in recent years. After a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, a Black teenager living in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, student protests erupted across college campuses.
Amid this student activism around racism, some U.S. research universities publicly committed to making their faculties more diverse. By 2015, at least 88 of the country's 187 leading research universities had promised to take this step. Another 96 schools made similar commitments over the next few years, including after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, a Black man living in Minneapolis.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
