In many ways, Morgan Newman is having an ideal college experience. Of note, the 19-year-old junior at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee started her own student group — Black Girls Lift, which empowers young women through speech, sisterhood and exercise — and is a member of the multicultural leadership council.
“I enjoy Vanderbilt a lot,” says Newman, who is double majoring in public policy and sociology. But there is one aspect of college life that is less than ideal: the lack of diversity within the faculty. The percentage of minority faculty at Vanderbilt, for example, is 17 percent, according to U.S. News data.
Newman says it’s been challenging to find faculty members who look like her and share her interests, and she wishes she had considered faculty makeup during her college search.
“Being able to go to a faculty member who looks like you, who has probably had some of the same experiences that you face at a predominantly white institution is really important,” says Newman, who is an African-American woman and has only had two African-American professors, so far, as an undergraduate.
At predominantly white schools, underrepresented minorities — who are black, Latino or Native American — often have to grapple with seeing few, if any, campus leaders who share their ethnicity and can personally relate to being different from most of their peers and campus community.
[Ask these questions during a campus visit as a minority applicant.]
For Newman, she says, “It feels like you maybe won’t have, like, that kind of big support system.”
Faculty members of color can be an asset inside and outside of the classroom, says Tabbye M. Chavous, a professor of education and psychology and director of the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.
“Faculty of color provide students with diverse role models and help provide more effective mentoring to students of color,” she wrote in an email. “Exposure in college to a diverse faculty along with diversified curricula and teaching methods produces students who are more complex thinkers, more confident in traversing cultural differences, and more likely to seek to remedy inequities after graduation.”
Nationwide, African-Americans are 5.5 percent of college faculty, Latinos are 4 percent, and American Indians and Alaska Natives comprise less than 1 percent, according to a September report from the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania.
However, the report states that at historically black colleges, 57 percent of faculty are black. Latinos are 21 percent of faculty at Hispanic-serving institutions, and Native Americans and Alaska Natives are 41 percent at tribal schools.
[Learn about the top 20 historically black colleges and universities.]
College applicants who want to find a school with wider diversity, including faculty, have a few options for researching the individuals who are leading the institutions and programs of interest to them.
First, prospective students can look at the websites of schools they’re interested in and check the specific pages for the departments in which they’d like to take classes, says Melissa Bates, an assistant professor of health and human physiology at the University of Iowa. College applicants can then research faculty members’ ethnicity, training and background.
There isn’t a database or comprehensive list of professors from underrepresented backgrounds, says Alberto Roca, the owner and executive director of Diverse Scholar, a nonprofit organization that works to diversify the doctoral workforce, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math. But his website highlights faculty of color, allies and the various work that diversity proponents produce.
Roca encourages college applicants to likewise pay attention to social media. It allows faculty to have a voice and be open about their support of diversity, says Roca, who received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
For example, Bates recently started the hashtag #ScientistsTakeaKnee after hearing about Donald Trump’s frustration with NFL players who chose to kneel or protest during the national anthem at games. She’s also blogged about changes with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — or DACA — program that protects from deportation people who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children.
The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity also uses Twitter and Facebook to promote institutions and individual professors who support diversity. @CUfacdiversity, from Columbia University, shares a similar message via Twitter.
[Research campus politics when looking for the right college fit.]
Beyond the web, many institutions have an office of diversity and inclusion that can likely give prospective students information on the campus as a whole, says Kimberly Sellers, an associate professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at Georgetown University.
These offices often include data on faculty hiring and retention across departments and programs. At Georgetown, for example, the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity & Affirmative Action outlines its faculty hiring procedures online and provides contact information for those who may have more questions.
While finding underrepresented faculty to lean on in college can be difficult, Newman from Vanderbilt may one day grow up to be the change she wants to see.
“I want to go to grad school and hopefully get my Ph.D. in some sort of policy, perhaps like international policy or international relations,” she says.
Newman adds that she may have found a guiding light in an African-American professor from Vanderbilt’s law school, Karla McKanders, who recently visited one of Newman’s classes. McKanders, who has an expertise in international and immigration issues for refugees, and Newman seem to have similar interests. “Maybe I have a mentor,” says Newman.
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Research Faculty Diversity During the College Search Process originally appeared on usnews.com
