Colleges’ Promises to Diversify Face One Challenge: Finding Black Faculty

For all of their assurances that they’ll add more nonwhite faculty in response to last year’s student protests demanding more diversity on campuses, colleges and universities largely haven’t been doing that over the last few years. Even if they wanted to live up to their promises to hire more nonwhite professors over the next few years, the small number of nonwhites in the doctoral pipeline will make that difficult. Only 6.4 percent of U.S. citizen or permanent resident research doctoral recipients in 2014 were black and 6.5 percent were Hispanic, according to the National Science Foundation.