While diversity in undergraduate education has come closer to the forefront of recruitment efforts in recent years, a report in this month's Harvard Magazine shows that colleges around the country continue to struggle with enrolling
undergraduates and faculty of color. Tufts, the report shows, is slightly ahead of some of its competitors in these areas.
According to the report, Tufts' undergraduate body is at least as diverse as most similar colleges, many of whom enjoy larger endowments. Currently, Asian, Hispanic, African, and Native Americans make up 26.4 percent of the undergraduate body; 54.4 percent is listed as Non-Hispanic or white; 11.2 percent did not declare their race; and 7.9 percent of the student population is non-resident alien.
At Amherst, Dartmouth, and Williams, approximately 25 percent of the undergraduate population is minority students; Yale has 28.8 percent, and Harvard 34 percent.
Increasing faculty diversity has been something more of an issue. Recent controversy surround the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard has brought further scrutiny to college's efforts at recruiting and retaining minority faculty members. Professor K. Anthony Appiah will leave Harvard at the end of this academic year in what Tufts Provost Sol Gittleman called a "bidding" of the type in which Tufts does not engage.
"We build our faculty from the bottom up," Gittleman said.
Currently, 80.9 percent of full-time, tenured track Tufts professors are white, non-Hispanic, and 65.6 percent of the faculty are male.
The same Harvard Magazine article said that in 1997, 87 percent of full-time faculty in the nation were white, while 64 percent were male.
Gittleman said increasing and retaining faculty of color is an important issue and that Tufts is seeking solutions to what he termed "a supply problem."
"We have such a small pool of applicants that the competition for those few is very fierce," the provost said.
Gittleman suggested that faculty diversity would be improved by completely revamping the system, from the beginning of the undergraduate experience, all the way through how professors apply for tenure.
In 1997, Tufts' Task Force on Race submitted to then-President John DiBiaggio a series of recommendations outlining some of the race issues facing University undergraduates.
The Task Force was followed by an oversight panel on race which evaluated the success of the initiatives. The final report in 2000 stated that students felt that "the administration did not acknowledge or react in a constructive way to incidents of intolerance. The students had the sense that these events were being minimized or ignored."
A response team, created in reaction to this report, issued recommendations including additional sensitivity training for the TUPD and more training for Residential Assistants on how to deal with issues of intolerance. Several recommendations were put forth concerning "hiring more faculty of color, hiring faculty to teach in certain underrepresented areas, and addressing how race and diversity are treated in the overall requirements that students must satisfy to graduate."
But Gittleman thinks that when compared to diversity throughout the 20th century, things have greatly improved, and can only continue to do so in the future.
"The only time in the past 50 years on college campuses that race relations were easy was when there was one race and everyone was exactly the same," he said.
