The black faculty gap

Public Interest, Summer, 2003 by Nathan Glazer

INCREASING Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students, ( ) by the sociologists Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, has already aroused controversy. Recently the subject of a lengthy article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the book has made news because its findings bear directly on the important University of Michigan affirmative-action cases to be decided by the Supreme Court this June. The book's research counters in one important respect the argument that racial preferences are good for blacks and for higher education more generally, and it therefore may play a role in the Court's decision.

This will be the first time since the Bakke case a quarter-century ago that the Court will rule directly on the constitutionality and conformity to civil rights law of the preference for black students in admission to selective colleges, universities, and professional schools. The Bakke decision seemed to permit special attention to, and preference for, black and presumably other underrepresented minority students on grounds that diversity improved the educational environment for all students. Though only Justice Lewis Powell made this argument, he was part of the majority of those justices who (on other grounds) declared that the strict minority quota instituted by the University of California at Davis School of Medicine was unconstitutional. And thus college and university lawyers have taken his opinion as warrant for procedures that give preferences to black and Hispanic applicants. This is the thin legal reed on which preferences for black and other minority students (principally Hispanic) now rest. Oppon ents and proponents of the affirmative-action policies of the University of Michigan agree that this diversity argument will play a key role in the Court's decision.

COLE and Barber's study argues that there are important negative consequences of the widespread effort by elite and selective institutions to admit black students whose academic achievements fall far below those of the majority of students admitted. These findings are especially newsworthy because the study was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation--the very same foundation that had supported the major study by William Bowen (its president, and the former president of Princeton) and Derek Bok (former president of Harvard) arguing just the opposite. Bowen and Bok's 1998 book, The Shape of the River, had presented a good deal of evidence supporting the value of preferences for black students, and gave no evidence that such policies had negative consequences for white or minority students. (Stephen Cole indicated in the Chronicle story that he did not expect any further support for his research from the Mellon Foundation.)

Indeed, Cole and Barber's study has been supported financially by that galaxy of institutions--Ivy League colleges and universities and major foundations--that are uniformly in support of affirmative action in college and university admissions. The idea for the study came out of discussions between Elinor Barber, then a research associate in the Provost's Office at Columbia University, and Neil Rudenstine, then president of Harvard and a fervent supporter of affirmative action both in university admissions and in faculty recruitment. What, Rudenstine asked, could Ivy League institutions do to increase their numbers of minority faculty? This has been an important objective at all of the Ivies, as the number of black faculty in particular remained low despite efforts to increase their presence. Elinor Barber recruited Cole, who has done important work on the sociology of scientists, to join her in researching this question. The Council of Ivy League Presidents gave an initial grant, and the Mellon Foundation an d Ford Foundation soon lent their support.

There are many ways of approaching the question of minority faculty shortage, but Cole and Barber decided to focus on the occupational choices of minority college students of high achievement, and to examine the factors that determined those choices. The authors took the reasonable position that the chief source for college and university faculty, for Ivy League institutions certainly but in fact for almost all institutions of higher education, is the pool of better students at selective institutions and the large Ph.D.-producing universities. These are the institutions from which the authors drew their sample of students for their research. They limited the students in their sample to those who majored in the arts and sciences, the fields with the greatest number of students who go on to pursue advanced scholarly research.

The major data for the study was gathered by a lengthy questionnaire, distributed by mail with telephone follow-up, exploring occupational choice and its background. The recipients were all black and Latino students who had majored in the arts and sciences and expected to graduate in 1996. Students in three kinds of colleges were surveyed: Ivy League colleges (all were included); 13 elite liberal arts colleges including Amherst, Bowdoin, Carleton, Vassar, and Wesleyan; and four historically black colleges and universities ("HBCUs"--Florida A&M, Howard, North Carolina A&T, and Xavier University of Louisiana). Black and Latino graduates of nine large state universities (Ohio State, Rutgers, SUNY at Stony Brook, North Carolina, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, University of Washington at Seattle, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison), who had majored in the arts or sciences and had a grade point average of 2.8 or above (or at least a B-) also received the questionnaire. While al l minority graduates in the Ivy League, liberal arts colleges, and historically black institutions were surveyed, the authors limited the sample of students at state universities to the higher achievers, on the ground that it was among these that one would be more likely to find students choosing academic careers.