The Numbers Tell All

LAST week, Duke University approved a plan requiring each of the school's 50 departments to hire at least one more Black professor by 1993. Those departments that fail to meet the goal will undergo an outside review of their recruiting practices.

Duke's bold and progressive plan came after weeks of mounting pressure from the student body for an increase in the school's minority faculty. At the same time, activists occupied school buildings at Williams College and the University of Vermont in protest over those schools' dismal records in the hiring of minority faculty. Penn State was the site of similar activity.

At Harvard, frustration over the issue has been vented in a more tempered way, taking the shape of a six-page report by the Minority Students Alliance. The work of students and faculty, the report offers a broad and damning critique of the University's efforts, or lack thereof, to recruit minority professors. But the facts the report highlights are sufficiently shocking to suggest that unless the University heeds the recommendations and acts in a strong manner to rectify the situation, the path of reasoned discourse will soon become less appealing.

According to the report, entitled "Harvard's Minority Faculty Recruitment: A Sea of Confusion and Complacency", the number of Black senior faculty members since 1980 has dropped from five to three--that's in the entire Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Among junior faculty, there are now four compared to the eight that were here in 1980. Among Asian and Hispanic professors, the numbers have gone up slightly overall--but this reflects in part the University's own inflated method of counting which includes foreign nationals as minorities.

To the argument that the embarassingly low number of minority professors reflects the small pool of minority Ph.D. candidates, the report provides a firm if depressing answer. While Harvard has not hired minorities, in most cases it has not even sought them out. In five departments reviewed in the report, 10 separate searches last year looked over 750 applicants--and like the year before only four were minorities. Eight years ago, a study known as the Whitla report revealed that the names of minority candidates that showed up on other major universities' search lists were absent from Harvard's.

There is a pool to be tapped, however small, and to the extent Harvard refuses or forgets to draw from it is the extent to which that pool will remain small--the more minority faculty hired, the more likely that minority students will consider academia as a career.

The report's requests are modest, even generous. In the face of massive apathy on the issue, MSA asks only that Dean Spence set up a summer committee to investigate the need for a hiring plan and then publicly announce the committee's conclusions.

Dean Spence would be wise to follow MSA's advice; he would be wiser still to accept the full thrust of the MSA report and to formulate a centralized program of action. As the report clearly indicates, it is not enough to leave such goals in the hands of individual departments.

The plan recently adopted at Duke should serve as a model. If an individual department within five years cannot find a single qualified minority professor at either the junior or senior level, it should be forced to explain its reasoning and to have that explanation reviewed. If Spence does not take this route, he and his fellow administrators may find concerned students looking to Williams or Penn State for models about how to produce change.