On: Diversity in Higher Education

In news that should surprise no one, diversity in higher education is still a challenge for African American and Latino faculty. Colleen Flaherty writes discusses the troubling findings for Inside Higher Ed,

Eagan said he “wished” he’d been surprised by the data on diversity, but wasn’t. He encouraged individual institutions and departments to break down their data to see what’s happening on their campuses, and get to the “root cause” of why “roughly half of black faculty are saying they feel they have to put in more of an effort to gain respect and achieve legitimacy among department colleagues,” and one in three women are saying the same. He pointed to his university’s 2013 Moreno report, which addressed on-campus climate issues, as one example of how such issues have been tackled head-on.

Richard A. Baker, vice president for equal opportunity services at the University of Houston and a regional director for the American Association for Access, Equity and Diversity, said that while the data are “troubling, what is even more troubling is that they persist within institutions that could otherwise provide America with its greatest model of merit, equality, and opportunity.” He added: “Intellectually, we are better than this, but this appears to be who we are because, over time, the questions and answers do not appear to change.”

Read more at Inside Higher Ed.