One constant theme in this blog has been the experiences of minority faculty in academia. As Inside Higher Education reports, a new study sheds more light on some of the challenges underrepresented minority faculty still face as they and their schools try to close the representation gap:

Among the other results: The proportion of underrepresented minorities — defined in the report as black, Hispanic and Native American — together made up 28.7 percent of the U.S. population in 2006. But their representation among the faculty ranks at all levels in top departments in 2007 varied from 2.2 percent (astronomy) to 13.5 percent (sociology).

Among the engineering disciplines, civil engineering, with 6.1 percent of the faculty identifying as members of the underrepresented minority groups, had the highest representation, and electrical engineering, with 3.3 percent, the lowest. . . .

Nelson found a number of disparities between the number of minority Ph.D. recipients in the hiring pool and the racial distribution of assistant professors (the newly hired). In computer science, for instance, 3.2 percent of Ph.D. recipients between 1996 and 2005 were black, while blacks made up 1.8 percent of assistant professors at top 100 departments in 2007 (and 1.3 percent among the top 50).

Further up the ranks, the proportion of minorities tends to fall further. Among the top 50 departments, only three disciplines — chemistry, math and electrical engineering — had more minority associate rather than assistant professors. And none had a majority of their minority faculty at the full professor rank (Nelson writes that the opposite can be said for white males).

We should note that this particular study does not include Asian Americans (as opposed to foreign-born Asians) to be underrepresented minority faculty. I have some quibbles with that, but that’s a different question to ask. When it comes to the situation facing Black, Latino, and Native American Indian faculty, the numbers are quite sobering indeed.

The study also suggests that there seem to be enough underrepresented minority Ph.D.s out there in the candidate pool, but for various reasons, they aren’t being hired in their same proportions. I’ve covered some of the challenges that minority Ph.D. students face, but for those who make it to the end, one would think that colleges would be eager to hire them to help their schools improve such dismal representation numbers.

But alas, that particular ideal doesn’t seem to match the practical realities, as this study shows. So the question is, why is that the case? I think we in academia need to take a hard look at not just institutional policies at the college level, but also the nitty-gritty details of deliberations at the departmental level and how a particular department chooses their new hires.

In other words, it’s one thing for a college to proclaim that they want to improve their proportions of underrepresented faculty, but it’s another issue altogether for each individual department on that campus to take the initiative to actually hire an underrepresented minority candidate.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that all too often, at such departmental decision-making meetings, faculty in those departments still come up with all kinds of excuses to shy away from minority candidates and instead, choose, a “safe” candidate who almost always does nothing to improve their underrepresentation numbers.

Ultimately, the college may “talk the talk,” but when it comes down to it, it’s up to each department to actually “walk the walk.”