Now that the University has enacted a more effective strategy for recruiting black faculty members, administrators are beginning to question which parts of their tactics are working-and which are not.
According to a report by Provost Peter Lange, the University is lagging most severely in its recruitment of black tenure-track faculty and in its attempts to boost the diversity of individual departments.
During the past seven years, the discrepancies between the number of tenure-track black faculty and those who are not tenured has become much more pronounced: While the number of non-tenured faculty has increased by 273 percent, the number of those in line for tenure has gone up by just 39 percent.
"I am unhappy with the number of faculty that are falling into ranks that are not tenured or tenure-track," said Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences Karla Holloway.
Lange agreed. "Clearly, we need to redouble our efforts for hiring black faculty in the tenure ranks," he wrote in an April 19 letter accompanying the report. "We also need to work harder to increase a black faculty presence in fields and schools where black faculty are underrepresented."
The Nicholas School of the Environment, for example, employs no black faculty members, despite its 1991 creation of a diversity task force. Similarly, the Pratt School of Engineering and the Fuqua School of Business have low numbers, with 2.2 and 3.3 percent, respectively. Although the School of Medicine has only 2.5 percent, it has experienced a significant increase in numbers since 1993.
Lange noted in an interview that recruitment-particularly in the areas of science and math-is difficult due to the high competition created by a small pool of candidates. "The competitive environment for black faculty of the quality we would hire at Duke... is extremely intense," Lange said.
Still, some said the University should be recruiting more heavily. For example, Professor of Cultural Anthropology Lee Baker will soon return from teaching at Columbia University after being offered tenure and a promotion at Duke. Although he said the University seems genuinely committed to attracting tenured black faculty, it has not gone far enough.
"Duke still falls into the trap of using the old saw about not being able to 'find anyone,'" he wrote in an e-mail. "I usually retort, 'It's not that the University can't find them, they can't afford them!'"
University officials realize that in addition to high-ranking positions, black faculty are also seeking a community that values and practices diversity.
Lange said the creation of the John Hope Franklin Center for Ideas and Society-"a collection of interdisciplinary and international programs, primarily in the humanities and interpretive social sciences"-would further this goal.
Holloway, who serves on the provost's committee that oversees black faculty recruitment, agreed. "[The center] gives scholars of color generally a way to see the University is attentive to issues of race and culture, whether they work on it... as the subject of their work or their own identity," she said of the center, which will be housed in a renovated Hanes Annex.
Some new black faculty members said that the University seems to be on its way toward creating that type of intellectual community.
"I've read all the reports that they have, and there seems to be a major commitment on the part of Duke to increasing the number of the black faculty," said Paula McClain, who will join the political science department this fall. "At this point, I have no reason to doubt their seriousness about that."
McClain, currently a professor at the University of Virginia, added that she was more concerned about the presence of black students, not faculty, at Duke.
Jeff Forbes, who will also join the University next year as an assistant professor of the practice of computer sciences, expressed similar concerns.
"I visited 14 schools and I saw a total of three black faculty, so I was more concerned about the lack of black students," he said. "That was the thing. That's what I tried to gauge at the different schools."
The University undertook its first serious black recruitment effort in 1988, when it created the Black Faculty Initiative with a goal of having each hiring unit recruit one black faculty member by 1993. The initiative was widely considered a failure, and in 1993, the Academic Council's Committee on Black Faculty set a target of doubling the number of black faculty University-wide within the following decade.
This year's report expands upon some of the recommendations made in 1993. For example, in special cases, the University will now help pay for new black faculty members for up to five years; previously, Duke offered departments only three years of assistance.
Also, the University is beginning to follow up on some of the recommendations that had been previously been neglected, including the addition of diversity as a category to be considered in departmental external reviews and the start of discussions about mentoring junior faculty members by their more experienced peers.
Lange questioned, however, some of the other 1993 policies. For example, the 1993 report suggested that Duke recruit its own graduate students to serve as faculty. But Lange said this practice creates two problems.
"It's not necessarily the best thing for the intellectual growth of the faculty member to continue in the same environment in which they got their degree. In a sense, it's just another side of diversity," he said.
He also noted that Duke's tenure process tends to favor new faces, making it difficult for young, Duke-educated faculty to advance.
Still, Leonard Beckum, professor of the practice of public policy and education, advocated recruitment of Duke graduate students and said that when more criteria are placed on potential tenure faculty, it is more difficult to find them in an already small pool.
"An in-house home-grown person who is ethnically and culturally different... would add a difference to the department that is not duplicative," he said.
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