Faculties Still Largely White : Efforts Revived to Add Minority Professors

Several years ago the Ford Foundation stopped providing special fellowships for minority graduate students in the belief that the problem of under-representation of racial minorities in the nation’s graduate and professional schools was being corrected.

But this year Ford revived the program because it became obvious to foundation officials that there is still an acute shortage of minorities, especially blacks and Latinos, in the graduate student population.

The Ford program, which provides 50 annual grants of $12,000 per student for three years, is one of several efforts springing up around the country to increase minority graduate enrollment and thus, in the long run, increase the pool of minority applicants for college and university teaching jobs.

“The numbers of minority faculty are disturbingly low,” said Sheila Biddle, Ford Foundation program officer. “This seemed the quickest way to increase the pool.”

Current figures on the composition of the nation’s faculties are hard to come by, since the wheels of educational research grind slowly, but an American Council on Education report says that in 1981, 90.7% of the 467,304 faculty members in the United States were white, 4.2% were black, 3.1% were Asian, 1.6% were Latino and .3% were “other.”

“There’s no reason to think there has been much change since then,” said Reginald Wilson, director of the council’s Office of Minority Concerns. “Our impression is the numbers of blacks and Hispanics have either stayed the same or possibly gone down a little.”

Nor is the situation much different in California.

In 1983, 90.5% of the tenured professors at the University of California were white, 4.4% were Asian, 1.8% Latino, 1.3% black and .2% “other,” according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

‘Window of Opportunity’

In the 19-campus California State University system, the tenured faculty in 1983 was 88.5% white, 5.8% Asian, 2.8% Latino, 2.5% black and 0.4% “other.”

Patrick M. Callan, commission director, said the 1990s will offer a “window of opportunity” to hire more minority and female faculty members because many professors hired in the late 1950s and early 1960s will be retiring.

But this will not happen, Callan added, unless there are significant increases in the number of minority students pursuing doctoral degrees, since it is from this pool that future professors are selected.

Here the numbers are also discouraging.

In 1984, the last year for which information is available, 88.8% of the recipients of Ph.D. degrees in the country were white, 4.3% were black, 4.1% Asian, 2.5% Latino and 0.3% “other,” according to the National Research Council, which is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.

Black Enrollment Dropped

Between 1976 and 1982, the percentage of blacks enrolled in doctoral programs dropped from 5.1% to 4.2%, while Latino enrollment increased slightly, from 1.9% to 2.2%.

In professional schools--law, medicine, dentistry and others--whites accounted for 88.3% of enrollment in 1982, the National Research Council said, while blacks accounted for 4.6%, Latinos 2.7% and “others,” including Asians, 4.4%.

“The integration of our colleges and graduate schools is slowing,” Father Timothy S. Healey, president of Georgetown University, told the annual meeting of the American Council on Education in 1984. “All of us acknowledge the ideal of integration, but our zeal for keeping access open, and for working at the integration of faculties, has slipped; in some institutions it has disappeared.”

During the 1960s and ‘70s, when many colleges and universities heavily recruited minority students and affirmative-action programs flourished on some campuses, Healey noted, blacks enrolled in graduate schools increased from 4% to 6% of the total, Latino enrollments rose from below 1% to almost 3% and American Indian graduate enrollment rose to about 2%.

(Most of the discussion about minority under-representation has been concerned with blacks, Latinos and, occasionally, American Indians. Asians are considered to be adequately represented in most academic fields, although there are many areas in which few female Asian professors or graduate students can be found.)

Picture Changed Recently

In the 1980s the picture has changed, in part because fewer black and Latino youngsters are choosing to pursue higher education at all.

Healey noted that in 1975, 33% of young Latinos attended college but by 1983 this figure had fallen to less than 29%. In that same time period, the percentage of young blacks who went to college fell from 32% to below 27%.

A special problem exists in California, where a high school graduate must be in the top one-eighth of the eligible pool to be admitted to the University of California and in the top one-third to attend the California State University.

A California Postsecondary Education Commission study found that only 3.6% of the state’s 1983 black high school graduates were eligible for UC and only 10.1% for the state university system. The study also found that 4.9% of Latino high school graduates qualified for admission to UC, 15.3% for the state universities. By comparison, 15.5% of white graduates were eligible for UC, 33.5% for state universities.

“If we don’t get blacks into the university, we’re not going to get them into graduate school,” said William R. Frazer, UC senior vice president for academic affairs. “If they’re not in graduate school, we’re not going to get them onto our faculties. So the problem starts way back.”

Poor Exam Scores

An important reason why there are so few blacks and Latinos in graduate school is that they tend to do poorly on the Graduate Record Examination, which is given considerable weight in admissions decisions in almost every graduate program.

The Educational Testing Service, which designs the Graduate Record Examination, recently reported that only 2.4% of the black test takers scored above 600, considered high, on the verbal section and only 4.1% scored above 600 on the quantitative part of the test, while 22% of white test takers were over 600 on the verbal test, 20% on the quantitative.

Latinos also tend to score poorly on the Graduate Record Examination. However, some black and Latino leaders contend that the Graduate Record Examination, like all standardized tests, discriminates against nonwhites.

As another part of the problem, many black and Latino students come from low-income families and are unwilling to take on the burden of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt that usually goes with graduate study, several higher education officials who have studied the problem reported.

Quicker, Fatter Payoff

Many who decide to go beyond the bachelor’s degree see a quicker, fatter payoff in the professions.

“Bright minority kids are in demand,” said Jules LaPidus, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “The joys of graduate study may not be all that attractive to many of them. There’s more money to be made elsewhere.”

“Part of the problem is that we are victims of increased opportunity,” said James E. Cheek, president of Howard University, a predominantly black institution in Washington.

This is especially true at a time when academic jobs in some fields--the arts and the humanities, for instance--are in short supply. That situation probably is going to change in the next decade, but students often do not look that far ahead.

“To many of them, the academic market place appears bleak,” said Cecilia Burciaga, associate dean of graduate studies at Stanford University. “They ask, ‘What are you going to do with a Ph.D. in English or history?’ You tell them the academic market has its ups and downs and if what they really love is scholarship, they should stick with it, but a lot don’t buy that.”

Recruiting Lag

Inadequate minority recruitment and weak, or non-existent, affirmative-action policies account for the small numbers of minority students in some graduate programs, researcher Gail E. Thomas reported in a paper written for the National Research Council.

On some campuses, the predominantly white faculty never has been very keen about recruiting minority colleagues, an attitude that has grown stronger as the national interest in civil rights has abated somewhat in recent years.

“I don’t think there is deliberate bias--people saying ‘black guys aren’t any good’ or that kind of thing,” said a high-ranking UC official who asked not to be identified. “But departments that historically have been reluctant to undertake aggressive affirmative-action efforts are even more reluctant today. The times just ain’t with it.”

The “atmosphere of the Reagan years” is a factor in declining black and Latino graduate school enrollment, in the opinion of Sheila Biddle of the Ford Foundation.

“The swing is away from affirmative action and toward pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and that sort of thing,” she said.

Pressure Is Off

“All of the external pressures--all of the goads--are gone,” said Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman of UC Berkeley. “The federal government isn’t talking about cutting off research funds for institutions that discriminate or any of that sort of thing. I don’t think people are discriminating against blacks--I just don’t think they’re out beating the bushes any more.”

But LaPidus of the Council of Graduate Schools said he “doesn’t see much evidence” that Reagan Administration policies have cut into minority graduate school enrollment.

Several educators said the lack of black or Latino professors in significant numbers on most campuses means that there are few “role models” for young members of those ethnic groups to emulate.

“Any black, Hispanic or Native American youngster contemplating a major graduate school is bound to feel, even by eyeballing it, that the dice are loaded against him,” Healey of Georgetown said in his 1984 talk to the American Council on Education. “There simply are not enough black, Hispanic or Native American professors around to make his own success credible.”

Schooling Problems Cited

Many educators believe that low-income minority students have little chance to succeed, in graduate school or anywhere else, because of family disintegration and poor early schooling.

But others pooh-pooh what they call the “it all begins in the womb” theory, contending that most universities could increase minority graduate enrollment substantially by making a real effort to recruit and retain qualified students.

Until recently, many education officials viewed the declining numbers of minority graduate students, and potential minority faculty members, with alarm but did little about it.

“The subject comes up at every meeting of our presidents but there’s a kind of bewilderment about what to do,” said Robert Rosenzweig, president of the Assn. of American Universities, 54 prestigious institutions that grant 80% of the nation’s Ph.D. degrees.

‘Astounding Response’

But some have moved beyond bewilderment.

There has been “astounding response” to the revived Ford Foundation minority graduate fellowship program, foundation official Biddle reported. More than 900 applications have been received for the first 50 grants, which, besides the $12,000 a year for each recipient, provide $6,000 to the school the student chooses to attend.

A similar fellowship program sponsored by the National Science Foundation has made 548 new awards since 1978, surviving a 1982 attempt by the Reagan Administration to cut the program out of the federal budget.

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the Big 10 universities and the University of Chicago, makes 40 minority fellowship awards each year.

John McCloskey, director of the program, said all but one of the first dozen or so students to complete their doctorates with these grants have chosen to remain in academic life.

The California State University system spends about $1 million a year on “faculty development” grants, which help aspiring minority and female professors complete their Ph.D. dissertations or do research that might lead to a professorial appointment or to promotion.

No Payoff Soon

The University of California has started a variety of similar programs, including “mentorships,” in which promising undergraduates work closely with faculty members on research projects in the hope that the young students will want to pursue academic careers.

But none of this is likely to pay off anytime soon.

“I don’t look for much improvement in the near future with respect to black and Hispanic faculty,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Heyman said. “I’d like to see it, but I don’t expect it.”

To some extent, higher education is still in the stage of muttering about the problem, without taking many steps toward its solution.

“The word is getting out and there is a great deal of concern, but nobody is doing anything much,” said Biddle of the Ford Foundation. “Everything that has been tried so far amounts to a drop in the bucket.”

DEGREE RECIPIENTS BY ETHNIC BACKGROUND

Year Black Latino Asian Am. Ind. White Total 1975 1,057 337 1,025 36 24,961 27,416 1976 1,149 363 975 40 24,943 27,470 1977 1,194 474 910 77 23,654 26,309 1978 1,106 538 1,032 60 22,342 25,078 1979 1,114 539 1,102 81 22,396 25,232 1980 1,106 485 1,102 75 22,461 25,229 1981 1,116 526 1,072 85 22,469 25,268 1982 1,143 614 1,004 77 22,135 24,973 1983 1,004 607 1,043 81 22,216 24,951 1984 1,049 605 1,017 73 21,792 24,536

Source: National Research Council