By Jennifer Jacobson

How activists are trying to diversify the academy and why progress is slow.

The term "ivory tower" refers to the academic world of colleges and universities. It could also have another, more provocative meaning, given the predominance of a homogeneous faculty. For too long, the academy has failed to represent the rainbow that is society as a whole.

While recent reports show that the racial make-up of the student body continues to increase, faculty diversity has a long way to go. According to the most recent figures from the Chronicle of Higher Education and the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 5 percent of faculty members are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, and 0.04 percent are Native American—even though they represent 12 percent, 14 percent and 0.8 percent of the total U.S. population, respectively.

Like their minority peers, women have not reached parity in the professoriate, either. Although women now earn about half of the Ph.D.s awarded, they comprise only 31 percent of full-time faculty.

Recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty has everything to do with the health and vibrancy of an institution. A diverse faculty also sends a message of inclusion to students. To that end, some institutions have implemented diversity seminars for faculty, paired minority and female professors with mentors, and created positions for a chief diversity officer. Still, the numbers of minorities and women in faculty positions remain low. The shortage of minority candidates in the pipeline contributes to this trend. So does the tendency of minority and female professors to leave the academy because they don't feel supported once they get there.

The 2008 issue of American Academic, the AFT's annual academic journal, discusses these problems and offers possible solutions, one of which includes the union playing a prominent role. (See sidebar.) Given labor's commitment to social justice, some unionists have taken it upon themselves to advocate for faculty diversity. Their perspectives and approaches may vary, but they all share the same noble goal.

DIVERSITY IS A UNION ISSUE
Last fall, Dierdre Glenn Paul attended a program for new faculty at her university. Paul is the president of the Montclair State University Federation of Teachers and was invited to the program to inform new professors about the union. When she scanned the crowd, she saw only one man of African descent and a few Asian faculty members. (There was also a Brazilian in attendance, she later learned.) The lack of diversity disappointed her. "Faculty of color serve as powerful role models and mentors for students of color," she notes. "It makes them feel good and welcome when they see people like themselves. They don't take on this outsider status when they come into higher education. If for no other reason, that's important."

Paul says that the university has not successfully implemented diversity initiatives and has awkwardly tried to recruit professors of color. According to the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, in fall 2005, the year for which most recent statistics are available, there were 334 white, 34 black, 27 Hispanic, 44 Asian and no Native American full-time faculty at Montclair State.

Further, "one big problem is that in general there are fewer full-time faculty lines because of the use and abuse of adjunct faculty."

In establishing search committees and hiring faculty, "there's been an erosion of the peer review process," Paul says. During searches, "the administration becomes overly involved and steers the committee, whether it's through re-crafting the position announcement" or "picking who's going to be on the committee."

Members of her union have complained that when they serve on a search committee and plan to interview a person of color, the committee members are told to include existing minority faculty members in order to give the appearance of diversity during candidate visits. Moreover, faculty of color already employed there resent being asked to attend such interviews, Paul says, since the university has made no effort to nurture and support them. "Why would they want other people of color to come there and have the same experience?"

A couple years ago, Paul presented an idea to her officers to support minority professors. She wanted to design a mentoring and research program based on the suggestions of various constituencies: Asian/Pacific Islander, Latino and African-American. The response, Paul says, was lukewarm.

At the time, some officers felt it wasn't the role of the union to get involved in diversity issues. Also, because Paul was acting president and is black, there were concerns that people might view the program as "an extension of the African-American caucus," Paul says.

Although the program she wanted to establish never got off the ground, she continues to see diversity as a legitimate union issue.

So does the Council of New Jersey State College Locals, to which Paul's local belongs. In July, the negotiating team raised the issue of faculty diversity with the state, says Steve Young, the council's managing staff director and a chief negotiator. Some of the universities have brought professors into hard-to-hire disciplines, such as engineering, and have paid them higher salaries than those listed in the agreed-upon salary table. Young says the team made it clear to the state that it did not want these positions awarded to just one group of people: white men. "We very strongly said we wanted a serious effort made in these hirings to ensure diversity." Young says the team plans to monitor that effort. "If we believe they're hiring just white males, we're going to ask hard questions."

Paul wants the union to ask hard questions of itself, as well. "I'd like to think on better days that the union movement is alive and well," she says. "That's not 100 percent accurate." Truly committed unionists are getting older and will retire soon, she says, creating a dearth of leadership on campuses. Since many faculty members didn't grow up with unionism and know little about the concept, they won't be likely to join. She believes unions should take stronger steps to include minority faculty in their local, state and national councils. "If no special outreach is made to people of color, that exacerbates the crisis of the decline of the union movement," Paul says. "As we move forward, the leadership of the union needs to look more diverse."

THE SOUTH LAGS BEHIND
Like Paul, Derryn Moten is contributing to union diversity. The co-president of the Alabama State University Faculty-Staff Alliance and a member of the AFT's Higher Education program and policy council, Moten wrote the introduction to American Academic's 2008 issue. His piece, "Faculty Diversity in the Heart of Dixie," discusses desegregation cases in the higher education systems of various Southern states, including his own.

One such case, Knight & Sims v. Alabama, was filed in 1981 and settled in December 2006. The plaintiffs argued that the state maintained "vestiges of segregation" in the way it funded its public, historically white universities compared with how it funded its two black public universities—Alabama State and Alabama A&M University. As a result of the lawsuit, the state's public, historically white institutions, Auburn University and the University of Alabama, were directed to create strategic plans to diversify their faculty.

"If you look at appropriations, programs, physical plant, there's no comparison between the four campuses," Moten says. The number of minority faculty members at Auburn and the University of Alabama, he adds, is paltry. (Based on fall 2005 data, Auburn's faculty of 1,134 had 159 minority faculty, or 14 percent of the total. Broken down, the numbers were: 975 white faculty members, 48 black, 20 Hispanic, 85 Asian and six American Indian. In contrast, at Alabama State in the same year, there were 69 white faculty members, 136 black, zero Hispanic, 21 Asian and two American Indian, for a split of 70 percent "minority" and 30 percent white faculty.)

Such disparity is characteristic of public education in the South, Moten says, especially the Deep South. "Whatever the rest of the country has done, you can almost count on the South as lagging behind."

As state institutions, Auburn and the University of Alabama should reflect the diversity of the state population in their faculty ranks, Moten contends. To ensure that they do, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, in its Final Order and Judgment, enjoined both Auburn and the University of Alabama "to engage in strategic diversity initiatives that its administration deems appropriate to recruit, hire, and retain African-American faculty and professional level administrators." Auburn's strategic diversity plan (www.auburn.edu/administration/specialreports/diversity_plan/) includes establishing diverse search committees, implementing a mentoring program for underrepresented groups, and creating assistant or associate dean positions in each college or school to focus on recruiting, retaining and mentoring minority students and faculty.

Moten acknowledges that the lack of diversity partly lies in the lack of minority graduate students in the pipeline. Another reason, though, comes down to money. "By the time many black students graduate from college, they're so laden in debt that the likelihood that they'd apply to graduate school and add to that debt is just nil," he says.

But he believes there are other causes as well. "I don't accept that somehow all the good minority candidates are taken away by more selective, elite schools," he says. "African-Americans make up about 5 percent of full-time teaching faculty in this country. I don't have the hard numbers, but I'm willing to bet my first child—and I love that girl—that the majority of the 5 percent are at historically black colleges and universities." So while there are faculty members at historically black institutions who have chosen to teach there (Moten says Alabama State was his first choice), there are other faculty members at HBCUs who may be there by default.

Moten cites Race Matters, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornell West, to support his position. In the book, Gates laments that a number of traditionally white institutions hire blacks only if they are Nobel Laureates, Moten says. As a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the early '90s, Moten saw this double standard applied first hand. "Iowa seemed to be only interested in minorities who received their Ph.D.s at Ivy League schools," he says, even though there were not a whole lot them.

Although the country as a whole has made progress, more work needs to be done, Moten says. In his piece for American Academic, he contends that the lack of faculty diversity at many colleges is the result of benign neglect. But that neglect is never benign, he says. "It's certainly not benign to minority faculty members who've been kept outside the gates, if you will."

AFT IS ENGAGING THE ISSUE
The AFT is doing three things this year to step up the national union's involvement in faculty diversity and affirmative action issues. One is devoting scholarly energy to defining the problems and proposing solutions. The 2008 issue of American Academic focuses on faculty diversity. It is due to be released in March, at the AFT-NEA Higher Education Issues Conference. The 2009 Academic will delve further into the theme when it marks the 30th anniversary of the Bakke Supreme Court decision by studying the decision's impact on higher education.

The March higher education conference will feature Charles Ogletree as its Polishook Lecture keynoter. Ogletree is the Harvard Law School Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and, most recently, co-author of Brown at 50: The Unfinished Legacy, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Finally, the AFT has been meeting with the Leadership Council of Civil Rights and the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center to fight a number of state ballot initiatives to kill affirmative action programs. They are sponsored by right-wing activist Ward Connerly, who is attempting to get initiatives on the ballot in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Initiatives have already passed in California, Michigan and Washington.

"Faculty diversity is a complicated issue and one we're just starting to come to grips with," says Sandra Schroeder, AFT Washington president and chair of the AFT Higher Education program and policy council. "We're using these activities as a starting point to think more broadly about affirmative action and the AFT's role in supporting it."

INCLUDING DISABILITIES IN THE DISCUSSION
Members of the United University Professions/AFT have committed themselves to opening the gates of academia. Representing more than 34,000 academic and professional faculty members on 29 State University of New York campuses, UUP has worked with SUNY officials to create a new Office for Diversity and Education Equity. "This new office will help correct the historical under representation of Hispanic and low-income students on SUNY campuses," says Fred Floss, acting president of UUP.

UUP also has two committees dedicated to the cause: the Human and Civil Rights Committee and the Disability Rights and Concerns Committee. Sara D. Knapp is the chair of the first committee, and the former chair of the latter one. In a paper entitled, "Why ‘Diversity' Should Include ‘Disability,' " featured in American Academic, she contends that fighting discrimination against people with disabilities should be included in discussions about faculty diversity.

Since the 1990s, the UUP has raised awareness of disability rights through these committees and the founding chapter committee in Albany has won battles, large and small. For instance, Knapp recounts how the committee was responsible for the accelerated installation of an elevator in an old building after an arthritic member asked for help.The committee also successfully advocated for snow removal procedures that would allow people using crutches, canes and wheelchairs to get around. And in 1998, it prevented the move of handicapped parking away from the heart of the campus.

The UUP contract, Knapp writes, addresses disability concerns as well as minority issues, through committees and grants that provide funding for expanding affirmative action/diversity opportunities for women, Vietnam vets, minorities and employees with disabilities.

Union advocacy for the rights of disabled members is an inherent part of the union movement, Knapp writes. "We join forces—as do all minorities—not because of our individual conditions, but because ignorance, stigma, political circumstances and physical barriers deprive us all of rights and opportunities."

The very definition of unionism then lies in the diversity of those forces—whether they're in Alabama, New Jersey or New York—coming together as one.

Jennifer Jacobson is a staff writer for the AFT's quarterly magazine, American Educator.