Faculty members concerned about diversity took the academy as well as the American Association of University Professors to task for not doing enough to promote diversity at one session of AAUP’s 93rd annual meeting, “Telling the Truth at Difficult Times,” which started June 7 and concluded yesterday.
“Every time I come to AAUP, maybe I need to have my glasses checked, [but] it’s always been a [predominately] White organization,” said Dr. Anne Friedman, vice president for community colleges at Professional Staff Congress, a union that represents City University of New York workers. “You [AAUP] can’t talk about issues of race when you face it.”
Friedman was one of nearly 30 faculty and staff members who attended the “What’s Race Got to Do with It? Social Disparities and Student Success” panel hoping to get answers on how to recruit and retain minority faculty and staff at their institutions.
Out of the 282,429 tenured professors teaching in American institutions in 2003, 6.1 percent were Asian, 4.5 percent were Black and 2.9 percent were Hispanic. Just under 85 percent of tenured professors were White.
They shared their experiences of racism and some universities’ deferred efforts to diversify their institutions as part of a discussion to identify the problem behind low faculty diversity. Some blamed institutional racism, which they agreed to be the most dangerous form of racism, yet the most prominent on their campuses.
