Faculty diversity inches ahead

Duke has made significant strides in faculty diversification over the past several years, bringing growing numbers of minority and female hires on board. But following the first Faculty Diversity Initiative update last week, University officials said increasing success is no reason to rest easy.

Data from the initiative, which launched in Spring 2003 as an extension of the Black Faculty Strategic Initiative and Women’s Initiative, revealed that in the last decade, the number of black and female faculty members at Duke grew by 94 percent and 39 percent, respectively. The number of Asian faculty increased by nearly 67 percent and Hispanic faculty by 47 percent over the same time frame.

Nonetheless, of the the University’s 2,524 faculty, blacks comprise only 3.9 percent, women 29.6 percent, Asians 11 percent and Hispanics less than 2 percent. Moreover, members of minority groups are unevenly spread throughout Duke’s various schools and departments. 93.6 percent of all Hispanic and 85.9 percent of all Asian faculty, for instance, work in the College of Arts and Sciences or the School of Medicine.

With these numbers in mind, Provost Peter Lange said the University will “keep looking for opportunities” to attract and retain women and members of all minority groups.

“The diversity of our faculty has to be understood in a broader, more complex way,” Lange said. “What we want to do is assure that we are taking full advantage of the availability of faculty members of all types in all our fields.”

Emphasizing the need to strengthen the initiative, Lange noted that faculty diversity benefits many facets of academic life.

“Sometimes having faculty members from different backgrounds actually does have an impact on the kinds of questions they address and the way they approach them, and those can really enrich a field,” he said.

Though a priority for the entire University, recruitment efforts are mostly conducted at the school and departmental levels, Lange explained.

Despite this issue, Lange explained, Pratt has been successful at recruiting female faculty members, particularly in relation to other engineering schools. Pratt hired 21 women in the last 10 years—five in the last two years alone. Another woman is expected to join the faculty soon.

The School of Law has one black and one East Asian tenured faculty member but no other faculty of color. Women make up 22 percent of the overall faculty. In the Fuqua School of Business, 22 percent of faculty members are women and 17.7 percent are racial or ethnic minorities.

The Divinity School has five black but no Hispanic or Asian faculty members. Women make up 23 percent of the faculty. Similarly, the Nicholas School of the Environment has two Asian but no other racial or ethnic minority faculty members, and women comprise 18 percent of its faculty.

The School of Nursing currently has one Asian and two black faculty members. It also has only five men on faculty, but men are consistently the minority gender in nursing programs. The School of Medicine has focused many of its efforts on placing minority faculty in senior level positions. Three black and four female faculty members were recently appointed to senior positions, and Dr. Victor Dzau, the chancellor for health affairs and CEO of Duke University Health System, is Asian.

Retention of minority faculty members is largely dependent on these schools and departments’ internal climates. April Brown, chair of electrical and computer engineering and inaugural chair of the initiative’s Faculty Diversity Standing Committee, said Duke has already taken steps to address climate issues University-wide and new developments are on the horizon.

“Last summer, Duke piloted a department chair orientation—or ‘training’—and this is key to helping the department chair understand how to best mentor and guide faculty for success,” Brown wrote in an e-mail. “We hope in the faculty diversity committee to identify means and provide tools to department chairs to address [climate] issues.... I consider this our most important activity.”

In addition to conducting exit interviews for departing faculty, the committee will distribute a climate survey in February to identify areas in need of improvement. Many climate issues, however, were pinpointed in a 2003 job satisfaction survey. The survey showed that Duke faculty are less satisfied with gender diversity in their departments than faculty at other institutions. Faculty of color said they were less clear than white faculty about their responsibilities as campus citizens and as advisors, and female faculty were also less likely than men to be satisfied with racial and ethnic diversity.

A complex issue documented in both the survey and the update is the relationship between diversity and tenure. The survey showed that faculty of color were less clear about the expectations for tenure than white faculty and female faculty were more likely to believe tenure expectations have worsened in recent years.

The update showed that black junior faculty had a 36 percent tenure rate compared to 49.3 percent for non-black faculty; women had a tenure rate of 45.5 percent compared to 49.8 percent for men. Both women and black faculty, however, also leave the University at a higher rate during the tenure track than do men and non-black faculty. Hispanic, tenure-track faculty got tenure at a higher rate and left at a lower rate than other groups. Asians also received tenure at a higher rate and left at at lower rate, but their overall numbers were larger than Hispanics.

Brown said the committee plans to untangle these and other issues as the push for faculty diversification continues.

“While it is difficult to define diversity across the campus in a quantitative sense, to me it means that barriers are eliminated at the department level and faculty are working together,” she said.