Blacks in Crimson

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 4, 1999 by Ronald Roach

While Harvard has surpassed many other institutions of its size in its demonstrated commitment to student diversity, the university is still woeful in its representation of African Americans on the faculty.

The recent avalanche of magazine stories devoted to Dr. Henry Louis Gates and Harvard's Afro-Americans studies department gives the impression that Black faculty have made gains at the nation's most prestigious institution. But despite the university's high-profile commitment to Afro-American studies, visitors to the campus would be hard pressed to find Black professors teaching in other university departments.

When it comes to diversity, Harvard can tout an exemplary record on recruiting, admitting, and graduating minority students at several of its schools -- most notably the law school and the college. But despite three decades of significant growth in minority student enrollment, minority representation on the faculties of Harvard remains among the lowest in the Ivy League.

Excluding the law school and the Afro-American studies department, Black faculty numbers are critically low. Among the arts and sciences 1,179 faculty members -- excluding faculty who hold appointments in other schools, but including those Afro-American studies -- only 15 are African American. Of the eight total male faculty with senior status, six are in the department of Afro-American studies -- as is the lone senior Black female, Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.

In comparison, Dartmouth College, whose arts and sciences faculty is roughly a third of the size of Harvard's, has 13 Black faculty members. The total number of arts and sciences faculty at Dartmouth is 336.

The issue garnered national attention in 1992, when Derrick Bell, a once tenured Harvard Law School professor, staged a highly visible protest over the school's lack of minority women on the faculty. Bell, in refusing to return from a two-year protest leave of absence over the law school's failure to hire a woman of color, prompted the university to fire him.

The Student Commitment

Since arriving at Harvard in 1991, the university's president, Dr. Neil L. Rudenstine, has forcefully spoken out about the importance of diversity -- especially among the student body. He has written articles and a report that traces the history of diversity as a value at Harvard to the mid-19th century. This early commitment to diversity took root at Harvard, he says, when school officials recognized that as an emerging national institution the university would need to admit students with varying backgrounds from around the country rather than exclusively from wealthy families in the New England region.

The kind of diversity these postcivil war era educators were talking about, however, largely concerned an ethnic and regional mix of White males. The diversity which the university has been striving to achieve in the latter part of the 20th century has included a much richer racial and gender mix.

"I believe that student diversity contributes powerfully and directly to the quality of education in colleges and universities," Rudenstine wrote in the Harvard University Gazette in 1996.

Under his leadership, however, Harvard's African American enrollment has remained fairly consistent. In 1998, according to data filed by the university with the federal government, Harvard enrolled a total of 554 Black males, and 680 Black females. Together, these students comprised 7 percent of the university-wide student body (see BI The Numbers, for more enrollment statistics).

The Numbers from Harvard Faculty & Administrators