Globe survey reveals low faculty diversity at area colleges

As the city’s largest private university, Boston University struggles to match the diversity of its students with that of its tenured faculty members, according to a new survey by The Boston Globe.

The independent survey, released Tuesday, found Hispanics and blacks make up 3.4 percent of tenure-tracked professors at BU, with two percent of those being black. Other area colleges, such as Harvard University, have a tenure-line minority faculty of 5.4 percent, and reports from Brandeis University indicate about three percent.

BU students and officials said a diverse faculty helps universities recruit top minority students and provides them with mentors and role models, according to the article.

Julie Sandell, appointed recently by BU as the associate provost for faculty development, now oversees diversity efforts at the university.

BU has the highest percentage, 88 percent, of white tenured and tenure-track professors out of all of the local universities surveyed.

“If we are homogenous, we are weaker as an institution,” Sandell told The Globe of BU.

BU is also willing to interest minority professors with competitive starting salaries as a means of attracting more minorities to the field of academia, she told The Globe.

The survey comes after Emerson College was spotlighted last academic year when two black professors claimed they were denied tenure based on race. Emerson has granted tenure to three black professors in its history, two of whom had to sue to gain the rank. The college has since pledged to look into hiring procedures.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also recently released a report on Jan. 20 highlighting its own failures in hiring and retaining minority professors. Statistics about MIT in that report were similar to those about other schools found this week by The Globe.