Why are there so few African-American professors on campuses?

Seven years ago, Cornel West left Princeton for Harvard's African-American studies program.

But last month, embroiled in a public quarrel with Harvard's new president, Lawrence Summers, West threatened to go back to Princeton.

The spat began after a meeting late last year when Summers urged West to spend more time on scholarly pursuits instead of recording rap albums and campaigning for Al Sharpton, and West responded by questioning Summers' commitment to affirmative action and diversity. Their feud garnered media attention and threw the discipline of African-American studies into the national spotlight.

Then when West and Summers appeared to have settled their public quarrel, West's colleague Kwame Anthony Appiah announced he was leaving for Princeton. While Appiah said he was moving for personal reasons having nothing to do with the tensions at Harvard, his move only further intensified the spotlight on African-American studies programs.

The publicity generated by the battle between Princeton and Harvard for prominent African-American scholars reflects the relative growth in the voice of African-Americans in academia in recent years. As recently as 1990, Harvard's now preeminent African-American studies department was a largely unnoticed program under the direction of a white professor. Now, as the fierce competition for professors shows, African-American studies is one of the hotbeds of growth at universities, helping to bring focus on the number of African-American professors in the rank of college faculty.

The growth of African-American studies programs has helped to open university gates to blacks. Since the founding of the first African-American studies department at San Francisco State University in 1967, the spread of these programs at colleges across the country has helped to increase the numbers of African-American faculty.

Nearly one-quarter of all African-American professors nationwide are associated with African-American studies programs or departments, as one recent Christian Science Monitor article noted.

Yet elite institutions are still far from having racially diverse ranks. Out of Princeton's 1,107 faculty members, 18 are African-American. At Harvard, less than one percent of tenured faculty members are African-American, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Gilbert Harman, chair of the philosophy department and a key persuader in wooing Appiah to Princeton, cited several causes for the low number of African-American faculty.

"There are very few black students who are graduate students in philosophy anywhere . . . at least in philosophy this is [why there are so few black faculty], and probably is true in other subjects as well. Then we have to look at the percent of blacks at kinds of colleges sending students on to graduate study," Harman said.

This difficulty in further diversifying higher education beyond the undergraduate level is visible at Princeton. President Tilghman observed the difficulty the University has had in seeking to increase the number of minority faculty and graduate students.

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"Princeton in particular has made considerable progress in increasing the proportion of African-American students at the undergraduate level — in the Class of 2005, African Americans are 9% of the student body," she said."

"We have made much less progress on graduate enrollment and in the faculty."

The relatively low number of African-American graduate students does not fully explain the even lower number of African-American faculty. According to the New York Times, about 11 percent of all the nation's college students are African-American, while only 4.9 percent of the full-time faculty is African-American, little changed from 4.4 percent 20 years ago. About half of all African-American faculty members teach at historically black institutions.

African-Americans constituted over 13 percent of the relevant college-age population but earned less than four percent of all Ph.D. degrees, according to a report released recently by the Andrew Mellon foundation.

African-American studies faculty member Noliwe Rooks suggests that many minorities may still perceive a less than welcoming atmosphere in the academic workplace.

"There is . . . a question of perception in regard to a level of comfort and acceptance of them and their work," Rooks said in an e-mail.

Women and minority doctoral students are less likely to desire faculty positions than white male doctoral students, according to a 1999 study.

At least one University student has noticed the absence of black faculty.

Stephen Caldwell '04, chair of the Black History Month Committee, expressed dissatisfaction with the number of black professors at Princeton.

"I believe that there aren't enough black professors here at Princeton University. As it concerns black professors, I don't know that Princeton provides an inviting atmosphere for them," Caldwell said in an e-mail.

President Tilghman acknowledged more work needs to be done in making careers in academia more attractive to minorities.

"The lack of graduate students reflects the pool, unfortunately, so there are multiple fronts on which we need to work to increase the number of African-American professors," she said.

"The pipeline needs to be more full, meaning more undergraduates need to see work in the academy as an attractive option in the future, and then universities need to be prepared to make a serious commitment to high quality training and career development at the graduate level and hiring at the next level."

Aggressive development of African-American studies programs and departments has been touted as a potential remedy. West's threat to leave for Princeton fueled rumors that Princeton, the only Ivy League school without a major in African-American studies, would soon revamp its program into a full department.

Insiders to the negotiations between Princeton and the Harvard professors say off the record that one reason why they may be attracted to Princeton is the prospect of developing its existing program into a leading department of the field.

Supporters say granting the program departmental status would be symbolic recognition of the importance of African-Americans in academia.

"With a University-recognized department in African-American studies, potential minority employees will see that the University does care about its minority faculty," Caldwell said.

What remains unclear, however, is the role of African-American studies programs and departments in asserting the presence of African-Americans.

Summers' feud with West focused attention on a national debate within the African-American community about where African-American studies departments and programs ought to be concentrating their efforts.

Several scholars applauded West's pursuits outside academia as a return to the activist roots of African-American studies. In a recent interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Edmund Gordon, director of the center for African and African-American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, justified West's non-scholarly activities.

"Maybe recording a rap CD was not the best way to do it, but at least it was an attempt to reach the community," he said.

Charles Henry, chairman of the African-American Studies department at the University of California at Berkeley, agreed in the same interview that African-American faculty should maintain close connections to the African-American community.

"The firm community links most departments started [with] have been disappearing," Henry said.

Some argue that African-American Studies departments do not alleviate racial biases, existing or perceived. Regent Ward Connerly, a proponent of California's Proposition 209 that banned affirmative action from the admissions policies of UC schools in 1996, recently claimed that "ethnic studies programs" tend to segregate campuses as they typically attract students of the ethnic backgrounds being studied.

Rooks notes that at Princeton, at least, classes in African-American studies almost always have non-African-American students.

"It is rare for our classes to only have African-American students in them. I'm not suggesting that it never happens, but it is not overwhelmingly common," he said.

In addition to developing African-American studies programs, intense recruiting of minority faculty is key to diversifying universities. For Princeton, the two goals have merged in their efforts to bring well-known minority faculty members to its African-American studies program. Dean of the faculty Joseph Taylor acknowledged this in a recent interview with the Boston Globe.

"It's an effort to recruit the best scholars and teachers . . . we have a small African-American studies program and we had important losses. We have been feeling the losses and we are trying to replace them," Taylor said.

Some scholars have speculated that West's threat to leave for Princeton was designed to further a personal political agenda at Harvard instead of expressing a genuine interest in relocating.

Whether West stays put at Harvard or comes to Princeton, the University seems determined to pursue recruitment of minority faculty as a top priority. Provost Amy Gutmann reaffirmed her commitment to this policy in an e-mail.

"The most effective way of overcoming a discriminatory past — which otherwise would still send negative messages to women and minorities — is to take affirmative steps to attract women and minorities," she said.

"This entails ensuring that we take seriously scholarly fields and networks that we have neglected in the past, just as we now recruit students at schools that we had neglected in the past."