Study examines lack of faculty diversity

    Colleges in the Boston area are lacking in faculty diversity and have low numbers of African-American and Hispanic tenure-track professors, according to a recent survey by the Boston Globe.
    The survey reveals that at Tufts these minority groups make up only 7.7 percent of the faculty, a number on par with many other Boston-area colleges.
    Director of the Latino Center Rubén Salinas-Stern attributed this to the fact that minority students are deterred by the high risks associated with following an academic career path.
    "The students that I work with tend to be first-generation students and tend to be low-income students, and the process of becoming a professor is a very long process," he said. "It's a brutal process … I think it's really hard to get people to think that long term with so many risks involved and also thinking about the fact that they need to be out there, working, making money."
    Salinas-Stern also noted that full-time professor hires have decreased recently. "Universities are hiring less and less full-time professors," he said. "Universities are hiring more adjuncts and part-time professors."
    Some of the lowest numbers of African-American and Latino tenure-track professors are seen at Boston University, where they make up 3.4 percent of the faculty, and Brandeis University, where the number stands at three percent.
    Tufts' figure of 7.7 percent  ranks above Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which come in at 5.8 and 6.4 percent of faculty respectively. Emerson College's percentage is slightly higher, at 8.5 percent.
    Salinas-Stern said that he has not seen a significant increase in the number of Latino professors since 1994, when he began working at Tufts.
    "We don't have substantially more Latino faculty now than we had when I arrived," he said. "I don't see the numbers growing at Tufts, at least in terms of Latino faculty."
    Still, Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha noted that the promotion of African-American professors has increased since 2002 when he first came to Tufts. According to Bharucha, Tufts in 2002 had one African-American full professor and eight tenured associate professors. Today, these numbers have increased to four and 15 respectively.
    "We've doubled the tenured ranks of tenured African-Americans," he said. "We can be proud of some progress. It's noticeable to the community."
    Bharucha agreed, however, that Tufts still has room to improve with regards to faculty diversity.
    "The numbers alone aren't enough," he said. "You need to build a culture, a community, a climate that is welcoming to faculty from underrepresented groups, whether it's African-Americans or women in fields where they're underrepresented. That takes a lot of work, and we're trying to work on that through better orientation and better workshops."
    He explained that a lot of his work has focused on creating role models for younger faculty. "My emphasis was on building faculty leadership at the senior level," he said.
    Travis Brown, manager of the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Diversity at Tufts — established to attract and support students interested in scientific careers — noted that the presence of such role models was especially important for minority students looking to go into academia.
    "It's a difficult process for anyone, but particularly for underrepresented students, it's more difficult if there's no one they can look to as an example," he said.
    Bharucha feels that increasing understanding about bias is integral to any diversity efforts.
    "I think the more knowledge there is about the psychology of bias and perception of in- and out-groups and attitudes of attributions and how these things work, I think the more we can catch ourselves when we might inadvertently be biased," he said.
    He pointed out that research has disproved skeptics who claim that people are inherently unbiased.
    "These studies in social psychology and neuroscience enable us to see, scientifically, that there are biases that are unconscious that manifest themselves, and we need to work to compensate for those," Bharucha said.
    This research has been presented to Tufts' administration and faculty in the hopes of increasing diversity awareness.
    "I'm hoping that by better disseminating this new info from social psychology, more people will realize that there's a lot of work to be done still in order to create a culture, a climate where bias doesn't exist," Bharucha said. "Otherwise, many people are very skeptical of the need to diversify our university campus."
    Salinas-Stern said that Tufts will continue to work toward raising the number of minority faculty members. "I think you need to provide a lot of financial support, a lot of mentorship," he said.
    Bharucha echoed these sentiments, pointing out that diversification and equalization is a long-term process. "It's not something that has an overnight solution," he said. "You need to keep working on it and progress is slow."