All Articles Tagged "african american professors"
Do Black Students Need Black Professors?
(News One) — According to a Yourblackworld.com survey, 42 percent of black college graduates had never had one black professor in four years of college. Seventy-four percent only had one black professor in a field outside of Africana studies. Dr. Boyce Watkins was included in that 42 percent. In his four years of undergraduate studies, and seven years obtaining his Master’s and PhD, Watkins claims he never had one black professor. Watkins writes: “During a four-year college career, most students take roughly 40 courses. Personally, I went to graduate school for another seven years after college, taking an additional 40 to 50 more classes. During my entire undergraduate, masters and doctoral experience, I never had one African American professor.”
Few African-Americans Serve as Head of The Class in Higher Education
By B. Hutson
African-American students have enough pressure on their shoulders to overcome the infamous achievement gap during their K-12 years, but it’s certainly discouraging for those students to advance to higher education and face what’s being called the ‘aspiration gap’—the discouraging reality that throughout their college years, they will hardly see any professors of color leading the classroom.
This is the focus of a recent survey conducted by YourBlackWorld.com in which it was concluded that 42 percent of all African-Americans who attended a predominantly white university never had a single black professor in college. In addition, three-quarters of those students only had one black professor in a field outside of African-American studies.
Nearly four years ago, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found similar results from their survey of the nation’s highest-ranked universities. The Journal stated that “nationwide, just over 5 percent of all full-time faculty members at colleges and universities in the U.S. are black”, proving that not much has changed over the years. However, the Journal found that the nation’s most highly selective liberal arts colleges had a better track record at hiring black faculty. Out of 24 liberal arts colleges that responded to their survey, nine had black faculty of 5 percent or more.
So is the lack of black faculty in higher education a case of a lack of qualified candidates in the ‘academic pipeline’ as college and university administrators have suggested, or are these colleges and universities not being effective in recruiting teachers?
Whatever the case, missing professors of color is a dire situation that can have impactful consequences.
“The presence of black faculty can make all the difference in the world when it comes to helping black students clearly visualize their personal goals,” said Dr. Boyce Watkins, founder of Your Black World Coalition, in a statement. “The lack of diversity on college campuses is a serious and persistent problem, and it serves to impede the likelihood of success for our children.”
Minority B-School Faculty Growing—Slowly
(Businessweek) — American business schools, much like American businesses, have some catching up to do when it comes to minority hiring. Stymied by a lack of minorities in the PhD pipeline and growing competition for minority faculty, progress in hiring African American, Hispanic American, and Native American faculty at U.S. B-schools has been slow. Bernard J. Milano, president of the PhD Project, an organization based in Montvale, N.J., that aims to increase the diversity of corporate America by increasing the diversity of business school faculty, says just 3.5 percent of B-school faculty and administrators come from such underrepresented minority groups. “When you think about the changing demographics of this country,” Milano says, “that’s tragic.”
