New Faces, New Knowledge

As women and minorities join the faculty, they bring intellectual diversity in pedagogy and in scholarship.

By Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner

I recently saw an advertisement for a business firm with the headline, "The Good News Is: Great Minds Don't Think Alike." The picture in the ad showed women and racial and ethnic minorities as very much a part of the company team. How many times have we said, "Great minds think alike," without stopping to consider how such a simple set of words might encourage homogeneous thinking?

In very basic terms, the ad that I saw revealed one of the greatest benefits conferred by diversity-the value of having different perspectives on an issue. Major companies seem to be discovering that diversity is vital to their success. If higher education intends to continue to educate students for the world of work, it must also embrace the contributions different perspectives can bring. In other words, institutions need to provide arenas in which students can interact and exchange ideas with professors from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. As the populations of racial and ethnic minority groups continue to grow in this country, the viability of U.S. higher education may depend on the ability of colleges and universities to meet this goal.

Unfortunately, recruiting and retaining faculty of color remains one of the most difficult challenges facing American higher education.1 Statistics show that African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans have dismal records compared with other groups in the rates at which they participate in the American educational system. The low representation of people of color among tenure-track and tenured faculty reflects this pattern. The 2000 edition of Minorities in Higher Education, the annual status report published by the American Council on Education, notes that 5 percent of full-time faculty are African American (non-Hispanic), 2.4 percent are Hispanic, 5.1 percent are Asian American, and 0.4 percent are American Indian.2

Moreover, faculty of color are unevenly distributed across institutional types, disciplines, and academic ranks. A 1993 survey by Adalberto Aguire, Jr., of Chicano faculty members found that they are overrepresented at two-year institutions and underrepresented at four-year institutions. And a study I conducted recently with Samuel Myers, a professor of social justice and human relations at the University of Minnesota, discovered that across disciplines, African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics are acutely underrepresented in science and engineering. Across ranks, Asian Americans are grossly underrepresented among academic administrators.

Similarly, a 1997 survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, concluded that in terms of numbers and presence, racial and ethnic minorities continue to be almost invisible among college and university faculties. The scarcity of professors from minority groups perpetuates the stereotype that minorities cannot achieve as much as whites in academe. "I think the paucity of black professors and administrators," a tenured African American social scientist and dean at a major midwestern university commented, "reinforces the presumption people have that we're out of place."

Better Teaching and Learning

Ernest Boyer in his 1990 book Scholarship Reconsidered described ways in which scholarly work must change to meet the educational needs and social challenges of the twenty-first century. Among other recommendations, he called on the academic community to give more consideration to "the scholarship of teaching." Such scholarship places the development and implementation of creative approaches to instruction, such as active learning, service learning, and critical thinking, on the same level as other kinds of scholarly work. In the years since publication of Boyer's book, pedagogy has become a much more important element in academic life.

In examining how faculty of color and white faculty differ with respect to Boyer's views of scholarship, a 1999 study by anthony antonio of Stanford University found that

faculty of color are 30 percent more likely than white faculty to value the emotional development of students as well as the out-of-class experience as part of the . . . educational charge [of faculty members] as teachers. . . . [Faculty of color] are 63 percent more likely than are white faculty to pursue a position in the academy because they draw a connection between the professoriate and the ability to effect change in society.

According to this study, faculty of color are at the forefront of broadening the conception of scholarship as defined by Boyer.

In his 1999 article, "When Color-Blind Is Color Bland: Ensuring Faculty Diversity in Higher Education," in the Stanford Law and Policy Review, Jonathan Alger, former AAUP counsel, notes that arguments for diversity among faculty in higher education are no less compelling than those for diversity among students. The theoretical framework justifying diversity-based affirmative action in admissions decisions was established by Justice Lewis Powell's opinion in the 1978 Supreme Court ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Powell tied diversity directly to the educational mission of colleges and universities when he asserted that it can contribute to a "robust exchange of ideas" on campus.

Alger argues that facilitating such an exchange of ideas requires creating a community of students and teachers from different backgrounds who can learn from their interactions with one another in and outside the classroom. From this point of view, encouraging diversity among students and faculty is a matter of educational quality as well as equality.

Better Scholarship

The advantages of building a diverse faculty do not stop with teaching and learning. Academics from minority groups bring perspectives to higher education that expand and enrich scholarship. The acclaimed 1997 documentary Shattering the Silences explores how eight scholars of color changed and were changed by their disciplines and institutions. Research conducted by two of these scholars, Shawn Wong, a professor of English at the University of Washington, and Darlene Clark Hine, a professor of history at Michigan State University, highlight the contributions diverse perspectives can offer to academe.

As a young scholar, Wong wanted to major in Asian American literature, but he could find no courses to take or known literature to study. His professors could not help him, because they did not know of any Asian American writers or Asian American publications. But Wong did not give up. He took it upon himself to search for Asian American writers in the United States. He "discovered" many Asian American authors who had been "languishing in obscurity," lost to academe. His search opened up a new field of study: Asian American literature.

Just as Wong made visible the literary contributions of Asian Americans, Hine threw light on the historical contributions of African American women. When she was an assistant professor, Hine received a telephone call from someone who asked her to write a history of black women in Indiana. At first, she was reluctant, thinking she did not possess the background; she knew nothing about black women in Indiana. But she quickly concluded that "historians can write a history of anything and anyone; the key is that the historian must decide that that thing, event, person, or group is worthy of historical investigation-worth studying." Referring to the study, she recalls, "I entered another universe, one I had never known existed." Through her work, Hine helped to create a new field: African American women's history. She believes that generating knowledge can promote social change: "If we want a new world, I think we have to make new people-students are new people in the making, and we have to teach them a new history."

As Hine's research shows, scholars study subjects they see as worthwhile. Elma Gonzalez, a professor in the organismic biology, ecology, and evolution department at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies issues of concern to minority faculty. She argues that because researchers transform knowledge by investigating topics that interest them, scholars from minority groups who study matters that concern their own communities bring new issues into the world of scholarship and help to transform our knowledge base.

Communities of color are directly affected, in and outside of the classroom, by what knowledge produced in the academy encompasses and what it leaves out. It was someone in the black community, in fact, who prodded Hine to explore a new field, because that person believed that Hine, as a black woman and a historian, would be interested in the history of black women in Indiana. Diversification of the professoriate may create more opportunities for communities of color to participate in knowledge production.

Elma Gonzalez argues that to increase the probability that new problems will be addressed, we need to increase the number of scholars likely to find those problems interesting. Doing so will eventually have an impact on an institution's research agenda. The range of subjects considered worthy of study will expand in proportion to the diversity of the faculty pursuing research questions that interest them.

The expansion of scholarship in all fields depends on the ability of institutions to recruit minority scholars who, like Wong and Hine, have the power and independence to influence the direction of research. The May-June 2000 issue of Academe explores the link between tenure and scholarship, underscoring the importance of tenure to the research pursuits of faculty of color. Tenure protects the independence of faculty members and allows them to set their own research agendas. Such an environment is essential for minority faculty whose scholarship may challenge the status quo. Ideally, tenure and academic freedom promote inclusion and a broadening of our understanding of what constitutes the body of knowledge in colleges and universities.

New Programs

In the 1960s and 1970s affirmative action opened the doors to higher education to people of color. Since then, new courses have proliferated in many disciplines, and entire academic programs have been created to study issues relevant to minorities. In a search for academic journals that publish research of interest to racial and ethnic groups, I found more than a hundred, such as the Hispanic Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, the Amerasia Journal, and the Journal of American Indian Education. During the same period, organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science have initiated research projects such as the "Short Course on Racial and Ethnic Minorities as Research Subjects: Challenges for Research Ethics." Faculty of color have been at the forefront of all these developments.

The academic enterprise depends on the contributions of faculty members. They design the curriculum and create, legitimize, and broaden knowledge. In many ways, they also determine the quality of the experience students will receive in college. Senior faculty of color, asked why they remain in academe, report among their most important reasons that they stay to promote racial understanding and to interact with other faculty and students of color. One tenured African American professor explained, "I love teaching. . . . I teach predominantly white students. I may be the only exposure they have to people of color."

Contributions from faculty of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds are central to the mission of the academy, an enterprise that purports to further the interests of the common good through a free search for and interpretation of knowledge. The AAUP uses similar language regarding the purposes of higher education in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. It may be that some great minds think alike and some do not. But in the professoriate, diversity-including racial and ethnic diversity-can help us to continue building an inclusive base of knowledge.

Notes:

1. The terms "faculty of color" and "people of color" are used to refer to people of African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Latino origin. Asian Americans are included because even though their representation in the professoriate appears far better, exclusion continues to be a theme addressed by Asian American faculty in much of the literature.Back to text

2.There is no consensus within the Hispanic/Latino/Chicano community as to how its members should be collectively described. Often, the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" are used interchangeably. But some people who do not want to be associated with Spain or Europe use "Latino" exclusively to highlight their origins in Latin American countries. Hispanics may be of any race; most trace their ancestry to a Spanish-speaking country. The term "Chicano" usually refers to people of Mexican origin, whether born in the United States or Mexico. Back to text

Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner is professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Arizona State University.

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