Cornell Profs Draw Up Minority Hiring Plan

In a report released last week, two Cornell professors criticized the school's affirmative action policies, calling for a more than 500 percent increase in the university's minority faculty over the next 30 years.

In their 58-page study, prepared for the Faculty and Staff Against Apartheid, professors Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. and Walter I. Cohen state that Cornell, with only 4.4 percent of its faculty members of minority groups, lags far behind the rest of the Ivies.

"Cornell is concerned about its relationship to schools like Harvard and Stanford," said co-author Gates, a professor of English and Africana studies and Cornell's only Black full professor. "We set our goals in relation to them," said Gates, who is also the chairman of Harvard's Visiting Committee on Afro-American Studies and a research associate at Harvard's Dubois Institute.

"Our recommendations are emergency measures to rectify a critical situation," Gates said.

But despite the perceived emergency, the report concludes that Cornell "can become virtually overnight a major force in affirmative action policy formation and execution in higher education."

"I am alarmed at the ethnic-based animosities at major universities in America and believe that with a more visible minority presence on faculty, these problems could be ameliorated," Gates said.

Even though the study was not commissioned by the university administration, Cornell administrators have responded enthusiastically to the report.

"It is a very fine report. I'm very pleased with it and very glad they did it," said Assistant Provost Joanne Egner.

The study states that Cornell should aim to fill at least 90 of the 300 faculty positions that are expected to open up over the next five years with minority members. Ideally, the report concludes, by 2017 fully 25 percent of Cornell professors should be from minority groups.

Cohen and Gates recommend in their study that the university employ a strategy of "mortgages" or "pre-fills" in order to increase minority representation. With this strategy, Cornell would hire qualified minority applicants for positions that would not offically be vacant for 10 to 20 years.

"This type of program has been implemented at Stanford for some years now, with considerable success," Gates said, "and we would like to see the same thing here at Cornell."

The report also recommends that departments within the Arts and Sciences faculty define vacant positions more loosely in order to increase minority response and to provide greater communication between departments about minority hiring.

In the past, Gates explained, various faculties have not hired minority professors, claiming that no qualified minorities applied. "What we want to see is an isolating and identifying of qualified minorities through active recruiting, and then creating a position for the candidate," he said.

As these measures take effect, the report predicts, more and more minorities will apply through what Cohen and Gates call a "snowball" effect.

One of the strengths of the report, Egner said, is that Cohen and Gates recognize the importance of communication between the faculties and departments, which have traditionally acted independently in hiring personnel, for the purpose increasing minority representation.

"The faculty has made the decisions in the past, and so to remedy the situation, the faculty must join together," she said.

Egner said she was especially impressed by the report's recommendation that Cornell create tenure track faculty positions exclusively for minorities.