AAU Membership at What Cost?

Black Issues in Higher Education, Jan 21, 1999 by Bill Robinson

When a university's quest for inclusion in organizations like the American Association of Universities comes at the expense of the recruitment and retention of minority faculty, some question the institution's diversity commitment.

These are heady times at the University of South Carolina (USC), the Palmetto State's largest institution of higher education.

The university's administration recently kicked off the public phase of a $300 million capital campaign that it hopes to reach by the school's bicentennial in 2001. Some $200 million in pledges, including a whopping $25 million from New York financier Darla Moore, has breathed excitement into a public university looking to escape from the shadow of its better-known counterparts in the deep South.

Research grants brought in by USC professors have doubled in the past four years -- to $92 million -- and the undergraduate library is moving up the rankings list of institutions with the best and broadest holdings.

Additionally, the institution is making a concerted bid to become a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU). The AAU is a group of 62 universities that emphasize such academic yardsticks as federally funded research, scholarly publications, the quality of an institution's library, and high academic standards.

But all is not well here in the state's capital. USC is struggling to attract and hold on to African American faculty in a state where 30 percent of the population is Black. And part of the problem has to do with the university's quest to become an AAU member.

Shortly after the fall semester started, Dr. Aretha Pigford, one of the university's most visible Black professors, resigned from the College of Education. Her decision to leave follows the departure of other African American professors, including three in the College of Social Work.

"I've reached [the] point [where] being in an institution where there is an alignment of what's important to me and what's important to the institution is more important than I realized. I decided to make a change," she says.

However, Russ McKinney, a USC administration spokesman, says the university is committed to attracting and retaining minority faculty members.

"It's very difficult out there -- for everybody," McKinney says of competition to find African American professors.

USC, which has a Carnegie classification of Research II, does have a laudable track record in one area of diversity. In the 1990s, it has emerged as one of the nation's leaders in graduating African American students. The number of Black students who pursue degrees at USC is greater than any school in South Carolina -- including the historically Black land-grant school, South Carolina State University, in Orangeburg. Approximately 19 percent of USC's 16,000 undergraduates are African American.

Nonetheless, it is still possible for students to spend an entire undergraduate career at USC and never see a Black professor in a classroom. Of the 1,421 faculty members at USC this year, 153 -- or 3.8 percent -- are African American. And the numbers at Clemson University, South Carolina's second largest public research institution, are even lower. There, barely 3 percent of the full-time faculty members are Black. In 1995, Blacks comprised 3.2 percent of all faculty at Research I and II institutions.

Feelings of Neglect ...

Paradoxically, while USC's faculty has shrunk by 8.9 percent in the past decade, the number of African American faculty members has actually increased 29 percent, according to the university's office of statistics.

"We are very concerned about recruiting," USC Provost Jerry Odom says.

Odom says he has money allocated in his budget to help academic departments pay for the salaries of minorities and, when appropriate, to make counteroffers to USC professors being wooed by other institutions.

When a high-profile professor like Pigford leaves, the void is difficult to miss. Pigford, who also serves on the state board of education, now works as the interim superintendent for Columbia's largest public school district -- a culturally diverse system with children who live on farms, in subsidized housing projects, and in affluent neighborhoods.

Pigford says she was happy as a professor at USC until she was elected to head the university's Black faculty and staff association about two years ago. It was then she began to mingle and interact more frequently with other African Americans on the campus of 26,000 students just a block from the state capitol, where a Confederate flag flies high atop the dome.

"As president of the organization, I found myself trying to respond to faculty who had major issues in their colleges. And some of those issues, they felt, were related to an insensitivity to some of the realities of Black faculty members," she says.

Odom says he's taken steps in the past several months to shore up any feelings of neglect like those raised by Pigford and others. He says he has met with advisers "to get to the heart of the matter really quickly," and has talked with his deans about "how to improve the atmosphere in their colleges."