"AS CLASSROOMS BECOME increasingly diverse at colleges and universities across the U.S., that change in the student body is largely not reflected within the faculty ranks. The growth of faculty diversity in higher education continues to move at a snail’s pace, experts say.
‘The bottom line is that most institutions, on average, are failing at this endeavor,’ says Julian Vasquez Heilig, dean of the College of Education at the University of Kentucky and co-author of a 2019 study that examined federal data on faculty diversity.
‘What we found was that the needle on faculty diversity hasn’t moved over the last five years or so. That’s a problem,’ Vasquez Heilig says. ‘So while institutions of higher education continue to say that they value diversity, they aren’t delivering results.’
He adds that higher education was initially designed for wealthy white men and took centuries to open to all minority students. That means the development and recruitment of minority faculty members has long lagged at U.S. colleges and universities.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, an overwhelming majority – 75% – of full-time faculty across the U.S. in fall 2018 were white. Asian/Pacific Islander faculty members made up 12% of full-time faculty, with representation of all other races falling in the single digits." …