As an undergraduate, former Black Student Alliance president Malik Burnett never had a black professor in his science classes.
Across campus, students like Burnett, Trinity '07 and a first-year student at the Duke School of Medicine, have expressed increasing concern about the lack of women and underrepresented minorities in the science faculty.
"I believe it's important for both African-American and non-black students to have black professors in the classroom," Burnett said. "This would serve to work against many misconceptions about blacks in the sciences."
Professors and administrators also echoed the importance of having minority faculty members in the classroom.
"We have a diverse student population at Duke and it is extremely important that students from all walks of life can find role models in the faculty," said Dan Kiehart, chair of the biology department.
Exploring the diversity
However, the numbers of female and minority tenured and tenure-track professors in physics, chemistry and biology at Duke fall far behind the nationwide population percentages of these groups and the overall percentages of those faculty in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.
According to the Faculty Diversity Initiative Update, published by the Office of the Provost, in 2006, 30 percent of the Arts and Sciences faculty were female and 6.3 percent were black.
Of the 32 tenured or tenure-track faculty in the physics department, only four professors, or 12.5 percent, are female and one is black, Physics Department Chair Daniel Gauthier wrote in an e-mail.
"I would give us a grade [on diversity] of fair to good," he said. "Our demographics are far from that of the general U.S. population, which is not good, but our diversity is better than many other physics departments around the country."
Likewise, the chemistry department also lags behind in the number of females and minorities, with only 10 percent of regular-rank faculty being women, Warren Warren, chair of the chemistry department, wrote in an e-mail. In addition, there are no black faculty members in chemistry at Duke.
"There are a variety of reasons for this lower fraction, most of which trace back to personal choice," Warren said, adding that the number of female applicants for most junior faculty positions in chemistry is very small.
The graduate program in chemistry, however, is almost evenly split between males and females, and all recitation teaching assistants for general chemistry are female, he said.
In addition, Warren said there is one minority, a female Hispanic student, in his own research group.
In contrast to the physics and chemistry departments, the biology department has a higher proportion of females. However, it still falls behind in the percentage of minorities.
Out of 41 tenure-track or tenured faculty in the biology department, 12 professors, or 29 percent, are female, one is black and one is Hispanic, Kiehart said.
"My feeling is that these statistics are probably very good or better in comparison to most other colleges," Kiehart said. "Fifteen years ago, before I came to Duke, I was at Harvard and the numbers didn't even come close to comparing."
Kiehart added that at lower levels of academia-graduate students and introductory professorships-there are approximately the same number of males and females, but looking at the tenured professors, that ratio skews more toward males.
"When you look at a stable scientific faculty, there's only a quarter women," he said. "And that's a problem."
Although the proportion of females in biology are still far below that of the population average, professors stressed that there is equality among the males and females in the department.
Heather Stapleton, assistant professor of environmental science, said she went through college and graduate school in environmental chemistry hearing stories of inequality and prejudice against women in academia, but said she has not seen this bias at Duke.
"From my experience, I feel like it is definitely equivalent between males and females here," she said. "I think at my current level, most of my colleagues that are female are very successful and doing well."
Administrative response
Although the science faculty is lacking in the number of females and blacks, administrators said they are working to correct the imbalance.
Chairs of the biology, chemistry and physics departments all said they have implemented programs to recruit more diverse faculty members.
When a position within the biology department opens, Kiehart said he notifies prominent minority scientists at different universities so they might refer other qualified minority applicants.
"We will always try to change the number of minorities," he said. "We feel that we can do better."
In addition, the University is working to enhance minority recruitment and hiring efforts as a way to increase the numbers of underrepresented groups in the faculty, Dr. Nancy Allen, professor of medicine and vice provost for faculty diversity, wrote in an e-mail.
The Office of the Provost and the department chairs are enhancing career flexibility policies such as parental leave and tenure clock relief to help women. They have also begun a minority mentoring program and new diversity Web site, Looney added.
"The University has worked hard toward change," she said. "No, there are not enough minorities in the sciences. But we're working on it. Eventually, we'll see a change."
Many of the science departments implemented a program in 1996 to recruit minority students from around the country and expose them to the sciences, said Jacqueline Looney, senior associate dean for graduate programs and associate vice provost for academic diversity.
"The program is designed to attract students of color into the sciences in hopes that they will pursue a career in academia," she said. "We are adding to the national pool of scholars which may in turn help us hire more colored faculty."
But current efforts to attract more minority and women candidates in the sciences falls short of some students' expectations.
"I definitely feel that Duke, as a top-level institution, can do more to recruit African American and women faculty in the sciences," Burnett said. "It is, however, a nationwide problem that needs to be addressed."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.