The nation’s top universities always seem to be talking about the need to have a more diverse faculty, with one of the justifications being to match their diverse student population. How is an elite school like MIT doing? According to Diverse Issues in Higher Education, they apparently have the proverbial half-full, half-empty situation:

Of MIT’s 1,000 faculty members, 54 are Black, Hispanic or American Indian. The 27 members of those underrepresented minority groups with tenure make up 3.6 percent of the senior faculty.As much as MIT has fretted about faculty diversity, it appears to have done better than similarly selective colleges with a science and engineering focus.

In its latest survey on the climate for Blacks at top colleges, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education called MIT’s performance in hiring Black faculty “far superior” to the California Institute of Technology and other science-oriented universities. The survey reported that Caltech has two Black professors, both tenured, on a faculty of 309. Carnegie Mellon University also trails MIT, but not as much, the survey found.

Such universities have cited the shortage of minority scholars with doctorates in science or engineering as a major obstacle to increasing diversity. Gray has mentioned this pipeline problem in reflecting on his failure to add more minority faculty at MIT. But the pipeline has been expanding. The National Science Foundation reports the number of Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians awarded doctorates in science or engineering increased significantly in the past decade. They earned 10 percent of those degrees in 2005, compared to 7.7 percent in 1996.

But hiring young scholars with those degrees is only the first step. Giving them support so they have the best shot at winning promotions is another.

Therein lies the bulk of the problem that MIT and virtually all other universities face when trying to hire more Black, Latino, and American Indian faculty -- hiring them is easy, but retaining them and making sure they have the best chance at getting tenure is completely different. As it relates to helping minority grad students to succeed or diversifying faculty at the Universities of California, the issue is the same -- if you talk the talk, you also have to walk the walk.

That means that hiring faculty of color isn’t enough -- they also face specific and unique challenges in establishing their careers in a predominantly White social environment. It’s that culture of unconscious bias and resistance that needs to change in order for faculty at places such as MIT to become more diverse.