Faculty of Color Reconsidered
The status of faculty of color! has been of concern to many in American higher education since the 1960s. The consciousness provided by the Civil Rights movement of that decade led to efforts to diversify higher education at all levels, from the student body to the faculty ranks. In the proceeding decades, we have witnessed steady growth in the racial and ethnic diversity of the college student population, and recent trends illustrate unprecedented rates of growth. At the University of California, for example, just 70% of all undergraduates were white in 1984, and six years later this proportion had dropped further to less than 60% (University of California, 1991). Nationwide, college enrollments are currently 11.0% African American, 8.7% Latino, 6.1% Asian American, 1.0% American Indian, and 73.1 % white? (Snyder & Hoffman, 2000). Similar trends of diversification among college faculty, unfortunately, have not materialized. For example, in 1983 whites still composed approximately 91 % of all full-time faculty. Ten years later the representation of white faculty had decreased by just 3 percentage points, to 88% (Carter & Wilson, 1997). The slow progress being made by higher education to diversify its faculty has been widely recognized, and much research and debate have