{"id":590,"date":"2021-05-05T16:03:01","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T16:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/au-spr21\/?p=590"},"modified":"2021-05-05T16:16:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-05T16:16:39","slug":"the-numbers-on-black-faculty-and-students-tell-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/2021\/05\/05\/the-numbers-on-black-faculty-and-students-tell-the-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The numbers on Black faculty and students tell the story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h5><strong>Too few chances for tenure; isolation, exhaustion and a slow pace for change<\/strong>.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">By Jess Jurcek&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">What is the numerical reality of being a Black student or faculty member at the University of Minnesota?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Imagine a small party of 14 people. The whole party represents the undergrad student population; just one person would be Black.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">For faculty, imagine a larger party, this time of 33 people. All 33 represent the total faculty at the University; only one partygoer would be Black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">That reality has not changed much in years.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">According to data from the University\u2019s Office of Institutional Research, Black undergraduates in 2020 made up about 7% of total undergraduates. Black faculty, on the other hand, represented 3% of total faculty in the same year.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Behind these percentages, students, staff and faculty say, are problems with the campus climate and with recruitment efforts. Black faculty, staff and students do not always feel welcome or supported on campus, making it difficult to both attract and retain them at the University.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h6><strong>The persistently low level of Black faculty<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">In the past decade, the percentage of Black faculty fluctuated significantly, particularly between 2011 and 2015 when Black faculty decreased by nearly 20%. Since then, the numbers have climbed above where they were at the beginning of the previous decade. However, the total number of Black faculty on campus is still very small, as well as elsewhere in the United States. According to the <a href=\"https:\/\/nces.ed.gov\/fastfacts\/display.asp?id=61\"><span style=\"color:#0071a1\" class=\"has-inline-color\">National Center for Education Statistics<\/span><\/a>, 6% of faculty in higher education in 2018 were Black.\u00a0\u00a0<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe title=\"Annual percent change in Black faculty at the U of M \" aria-label=\"Interactive line chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-RlXKH\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/RlXKH\/3\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"400\"><\/iframe><script type=\"text\/javascript\">!function(){\"use strict\";window.addEventListener(\"message\",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var e in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var t=document.getElementById(\"datawrapper-chart-\"+e)||document.querySelector(\"iframe[src*='\"+e+\"']\");t&&(t.style.height=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][e]+\"px\")}}))}();\n<\/script>\n\n\n\n<iframe title=\"Black faculty make up a small minority of U of M faculty\" aria-label=\"Stacked Bars\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-Hm4kS\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/Hm4kS\/7\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"386\"><\/iframe><script type=\"text\/javascript\">!function(){\"use strict\";window.addEventListener(\"message\",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var e in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var t=document.getElementById(\"datawrapper-chart-\"+e)||document.querySelector(\"iframe[src*='\"+e+\"']\");t&&(t.style.height=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][e]+\"px\")}}))}();\n<\/script>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Anthony Scott, president of the University\u2019s Black Faculty and Staff Association, points to systemic factors such as the tenure process as a reason for the fluctuating numbers and persistently low level of Black faculty. It is simply harder for Black faculty to make tenure than it is for other faculty, he said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">One reason, he said, is that in general Black faculty get fewer research opportunities and have a harder time finding tenured faculty to serve as their mentors. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have someone pushing for you to make tenure,\u201d Scott said. \u201cthen it probably isn\u2019t going to happen.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">The difficulty of making tenure and lack of support for Black faculty is common across primarily white institutions in the United States. A 2017 study by researchers from Loyola University Chicago and North Carolina State University called \u201cRecruitment without Retention: A Critical Case of Black Faculty Unrest\u201d found that Black faculty consistently report feeling undervalued by white colleges, tokenization, and being recruited for work on diversity and inclusion efforts. According to the authors of the study, diversity and inclusion work does not hold the same level of credibility as traditional research fields, like physics or biology, making it harder for the Black faculty doing this research to gain recognition for their work, an important step in achieving tenure.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Nicola Alexander, interim associate dean for undergraduate education, diversity and international initiatives in the College of Education and Human Development, said that Black faculty and faculty of color can be asked to serve on committees more than white faculty because there are fewer faculty of color.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">\u201cYou end up doing a lot of service work,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd service work is valued, but it is not as highly valued as research.\u201d The extra time that faculty of color spend on service work takes away from the time and energy they can contribute to the kind of peer-reviewed and published research that helps secure recognition, funding and tenure in academia. Furthermore, Alexander said, success in academia is often assessed on a white, male-driven standard that may undervalue the impacts of service or qualitative diversity research and work.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">\u201cWe typically reward service work and teaching work with rhetoric and research with funding,\u201d Alexander said.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Issues with retention and recruitment apply to staff as well, Scott said. In his 15 years at the University, he said that he applied for at least a dozen positions and made it to the third round of interviews in many of those cases, just to be turned down. No Black men were hired in any of those instances, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">\u201cYou think, OK, it\u2019s so hard for me to move into the developmental opportunities that I want here, so why am I going to stick around?\u201d Scott said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Recently, however, Scott was promoted to a leadership role. He thinks the timing of his promotion has something to do with the murder of George Floyd and the recognition around racism and the lack of racial diversity that institutions like the University have since faced.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">There are still very few Black staff in leadership across the University. According to Anise Mazone, the director of the Multicultural Student Engagement Office and previous president of the Black Faculty and Staff Association, Black staff make up 17% of \u201clabor\u201d jobs like custodial and dining services, but less than 3% of administrative roles.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Having such small populations of Black staff and faculty, Alexander said, can make people feel isolated. Reaching a \u201ccritical mass\u201d of Black staff and faculty can make it easier to both attract and retain people, but the University is not there yet.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">While Scott says there is still a lot of work the University could be doing to diversify its hiring and make tenure less difficult for Black candidates, he also said that since Joan Gabel was appointed president of the University in July 2019, there has been a small shift towards greater support of diversity in hiring initiatives. Still, Scott said, \u201cit\u2019s difficult as a Black person on campus when you don\u2019t feel valued as a member of the University community.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h6><strong>The isolation of being a Black student<\/strong><\/h6>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Black representation in faculty and staff matters to students, Scott says, and is part of the reason that Black student enrollment is also low. Limited Black representation in faculty and staff can compound feelings of isolation for Black students.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">\u201cThink about how exhausting it is to be in a classroom where a lot of times you\u2019re basically othered, unintentionally by a lot of students, but sometimes maybe not so unintentionally,\u201d Mazone said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe title=\"Black undergraduates are a minority at the U of M\" aria-label=\"Stacked Bars\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-xu2aq\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/xu2aq\/4\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"402\"><\/iframe><script type=\"text\/javascript\">!function(){\"use strict\";window.addEventListener(\"message\",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var e in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var t=document.getElementById(\"datawrapper-chart-\"+e)||document.querySelector(\"iframe[src*='\"+e+\"']\");t&&(t.style.height=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][e]+\"px\")}}))}();\n<\/script>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">In 2018, the Board of Regents addressed these concerns in its resolution on diversity in undergraduate education. The resolution calls for greater efforts to recruit students from Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools, better evaluation of student recruiting methods, reduced four- and six-year graduation rate gaps for students of color compared to white students, and better recording and monitoring of the enrollment and graduation rates of locally represented ethnicities, including East African. Since the resolution was passed, Mazone said, the gap in four-year graduation rates between white and Black students shrunk by over 50 percentage points.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Part of this improvement, Mazone said, has come from paying better attention to and working to increase students of color\u2019s \u201ctouchpoints,\u201d or moments throughout a student\u2019s undergraduate career when they connect directly with advisers, faculty or other staff.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">One example is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Program (MLK Program), in which Mazone says that all students of color in the College of Liberal Arts are now automatically enrolled. Although this is how the program was originally designed, it was temporarily switched to an opt-in format, which Mazone said hurt the students of color who did not have the social capital to know that the program existed in the first place.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Robert McMaster, vice provost of the Office of Undergraduate Education, said that improving the campus climate for students of color is a combination of efforts across the University, including programs like the MLK Program, as well as hiring more faculty of color and targeting recruitment efforts at specific Minnesota high schools. \u201cBit by bit, we\u2019re putting pieces of the puzzle together,\u201d he said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Despite recent improvements in graduation rates and efforts by the University to improve campus climate, Black students continue to make up a small minority of the total student population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">According to Mazone, these low numbers are not only explained by the campus racial climate but by the Twin Cities racial climate, too. Recent police killings of Black people in and around the Twin Cities make some prospective students think that the University is not a safe place for them to be, she said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Furthermore, Mazone said, among some populations, the University does not have a welcoming reputation but rather is seen as an elite, wealthy and a white space. If prospective students come from a high school where they had few opportunities for college preparations, like ACT prep, or did not have a mentor who encouraged them to apply, it is unlikely that they will end up at a four-year university like the University of Minnesota.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Shemarr Kilgore, a fourth-year journalism and transfer student, did not think the University was an immediate option for him when he graduated high school. \u201cIn Black people\u2019s communities, I feel like there has to be more resources to help kids go to these schools, especially a school like this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h6><strong>More action, less talk<\/strong>&nbsp;<\/h6>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Some students, like Kilgore, say the University talks about its commitment to diversity more than it demonstrates that commitment through actions to increase diversity on campus. This tracks with results from the 2021 <a href=\"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/au-spr21\/2021\/04\/22\/survey-the-universitys-attempts-to-address-racial-inequalities-dont-resonate-with-students\/\"><span style=\"color:#0071a1\" class=\"has-inline-color\">AccessU: Black on Campus survey<\/span><\/a>, which found that about two-thirds of Black respondents and over half of total respondents think the University\u2019s response to racial diversity is more words than action. Kilgore said he thinks it is odd that the campus is not more diverse, especially given the diversity in the city of Minneapolis, which is about 20% Black, compared to the undergraduate population at 7% Black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Mazone often hears from students who are surprised to arrive at the University and find less diversity than they expected. However, she says that she does not understand where students\u2019 notions that the University will be racially diverse come from. \u201cThey have all been here for a campus visit,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen they walked across the campus, they did not see a whole lot of students of color.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">There are certainly pockets of diversity across campus, Mazone said. There are some classes and programs where students of color are in the majority, such as the Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence (MCAE), the President\u2019s Emerging Scholars Program, and the MLK Program. Mazone said it\u2019s important that students of color seek out those spaces to find support. \u201cIf you have one foot in and one foot out, you never fully feel like you belong here, then more than likely you\u2019re not going to do well,\u201d she said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Another space on campus where Black students are represented in higher numbers is athletics. In 2020, nearly 16% of the University\u2019s student-athletes were Black. Across the entire Big Ten conference in the same year, 14% of student-athletes were Black, according to the NCAA Demographics Database.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Black students tend to be overrepresented in athletics departments across the Big Ten. The University of Maryland, \u2013 the Big Ten school with the highest Black student population at 11.5% in 2019 \u2013 University of Minnesota, Rutgers University, Ohio State University and Purdue University all have a higher percentage of Black student-athletes than they do Black students. Requests for student-athlete data from other Big Ten universities were not fulfilled in time for this story.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Although athletics data suggest an over-representation of Black students on athletics teams at the University of Minnesota, Mazone says that Black students at the University have better access to support resources than their peers at other Big Ten universities. Mazone belongs to a network of multicultural student affairs professionals across Big Ten schools and said that in general, the other schools have less money and offer fewer programs focused on diversity than the University of Minnesota.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">Kilgore said that the University does offer him valuable resources and that he \u201cloves being here.\u201d At the same time, he said he is disappointed in the way that the University\u2019s support for Black students often is in response to a traumatic event, like the murder of George Floyd last summer.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color\">\u201cWhy weren\u2019t you doing more for these students before this happened? It shouldn\u2019t have to take something tragic like that for you to make a change,\u201d Kilgore said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Too few chances for tenure; isolation, exhaustion and a slow pace for change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":604,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":{"x":"0.39","y":"0.30"}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":"Photo courtesy of Anthony Scott","source_text":"","source_url":""},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Data-3-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":606,"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions\/606"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accessu.sjmc.umn.edu\/blackoncampus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}