The Faculty Diversity Initiative has been characterized by both successes and slower progress in its first three years.
At the Academic Council meeting Thursday, Provost Peter Lange and Nancy Allen, vice provost for faculty diversity and faculty development, updated professors on efforts to recruit and support female and minority professors.
Overall diversity has increased relatively little since the current initiative began in Fall 2003, following the conclusion of the Black Faculty Strategic Initiative.
Lange noted, however, that the University has a more ethnically diverse faculty than some peer institutions and is continuing to improve mentorship and recruitment.
Lange and Allen also announced that the University received one of five 2006 Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Faculty Career Flexibility. The award includes a $250,000 grant for accelerating improvements in career-path flexibility.
Such flexibility may be particularly important to the retention of female faculty members. In the last five years, the percentage of tenure track faculty who are female has increased only three percentage points, from 21 to 24 percent.
"We are not hiring and we are not retaining women faculty members at the rate you would expect," Lange said.
Among faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences, the disparity in retention is particularly marked.
Seventy-six percent of regular-rank male faculty hired since 1993 are still at Duke, but only 70 percent of female hires remain.
In contrast, the Pratt School of Engineering has markedly raised its number of women professors during the past five years, from 8 to 18 percent.
Retaining black professors has also been difficult for the University, which has an overall retention rate of 71 percent but retains only 66 percent of black faculty.
"I don't think the difference is enormous, especially given the intense competition for black faculty," Lange said.
This year, the University has a total of 68 black tenure-track faculty members, the same number as in 2005.
Lange attributed the lack of growth in part to the departure of some black professors last spring, when two dual-career faculty couples left for other institutions. "The numbers here tell... only a part of the story," Lange said, explaining they may not fully reflect changes in attitude and support.
Allen discussed the proposals for improvements in faculty career flexibility that the Sloan Award recognizes. Planned changes include new policies for flexible work and retirement arrangements.
The University will also work to provide education about current options to professors, especially the influential members of the Appointments, Promotions and Tenure Committee.
"Ensuring that everyone is aware of our policies is important," Allen said.
Dissent arose at the end of the meeting, when Kenneth Knoerr, professor emeritus of environmental meteorology and hydrology, called for black faculty members to work with area high schools to increase the long-term numbers of prepared minority candidates for both faculty positions and undergraduate admission.
"Unless we do something to improve the preparation of students at the high school level, we're never going to achieve our [diversity] goals," Knoerr said.
He added that he had first raised the issue at a meeting more than 10 years ago.
Nancy Hill, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, responded by questioning Knoerr's assertion that peers' accusations of "acting white" hold back potentially high-achieving African-American students.
She said negative peer effects are not supported empirically.
Hill said that as a black female professor-part of an underrepresented minority-she was shocked to hear Knoerr's words at an elite university in 2006.
"I am actually offended," Hill said.
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