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RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A group at Virginia Commonwealth University is working to reverse a decline in black faculty members.
The percentage of black faculty is lower today than it was a decade ago, Faye Z. Belgrave, a psychology professor and president of the Black Education Association, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1rt4eB3).
A report presented to the Board of Visitors earlier this month showed 37 tenured professors this fall, or about 5 percent, are black, while 564 are white. Seventy-four tenured professors are Asian and 14 are Hispanic
Eleven professors on the tenure track are black, 159 are white, 51 are Asian and four are Hispanic, according to the report.
International faculty have four tenure slots and 29 on the tenure track. The remaining fall into categories of American Indian, two or more races, and unknown.
The report did not include instructional positions filled by full-time instructors working under term contracts. There are 57 black instructors, compared to 930 whites, said Wanda S. Mitchell, vice president for inclusive excellence at VCU.
Shawn Utsey, a professor who researches the psychology of the African-American experience, is concerned about the consequences of people "never having encountered a black person in a position of intellectual authority."
"No student, black or white, should go through four years of college and never have a black professor," Utsey, a member of the Black Education Association, told the newspaper. "It's not good for them, nor is it good for society."
Robert Holsworth, a member of the VCU Board of Visitors and a former dean, met with the association in November and wrote a letter to VCU President Michael Rao addressing the group's concerns. He is concerned about a decline in the number of black students entering VCU.
"VCU is a school that's given a lot of students a leg up and the opportunity to achieve the American dream," he told the newspaper. "I think, if VCU's not in that, who is?"
Rao plans to hold town hall meetings in the spring on recruitment and promotion of black faculty.
Mitchell said the university will study data to target recruitment efforts of black and Hispanic faculty "in disciplines where we know availability is at a fairly high number."
She said it is harder to recruit from disciplines such as physics and STEM fields, for example, than from education and the social sciences.
Belgrave said change requires "dedicated, resource-driven systematic efforts, and I don't think that has happened."
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Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, http://www.timesdispatch.com
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