A Response to Richard Alba

Abstract

Richard Alba makes the case that the dearth of data about Catholic ethnics, for whom there are a number of reasons to seek information, is related both to the shift in focus to the greater disadvantages of women and of black and Asian minorities and to the cessation of interest in Catholic ethnics within sociology. This shift occurred once they were perceived as having accessed the middle class en masse. Alba takes Italian Americans as an exemplar and presents evidence of the possible underrepresentation of these groups on the faculties of elite American universities. The author contrasts the experiences of Catholic ethnics and Jewish Americans, citing the greater representation of the latter group among faculty at elite universities as the result of a collective struggle against anti-Semitism and collective experiences of mobility. He suggests that a prevailing pattern of individual mobility often involving self-presentation as emancipated from ethnic and religious traits contrived to work against the recognition of collective plight among Catholic ethnics. Italian Americans are a useful and justifiable group to select in order to examine empirical data relating to the access of Catholic ethnics to the faculties of elite universities. The data examined reveal that Italian Americans form between 5 and 6 percent of the US population and are now between 4 and 5 percent of the professoriate in US universities. A comparison, which was restricted for greater rigour to US-born Italian-surnamed male professors, found that in elite universities they make up 1.9‐2.6 percent of faculty compared with 3.3‐3.6 percent among all male faculty. This suggests an underrepresentation in elite universities compared with all universities of the order of 30‐40 percent and an even greater underrepresentation compared with the general population figures. There are problems, as detailed in Alba’s account, in accessing data on Catholic ethnics. The above figures are therefore necessarily suggestive rather than definitive in conveying any underrepresentation. However, the argument would have been significantly strengthened, and/or more complex, if data on other prominent Catholic ethnic groups, to the extent these can be traced, had been included. In particular, the longer established Irish and German Catholic groups might have been contrasted with Poles as well as Italians, two emblematic groups in the ‘new’ immigrations to the US of the 1880s to 1920s. This might have teased out whether the underrepresentation of Italian Americans is typical of Catholic ethnics or specific. It might also have indicated whether, given the better picture presented for younger Italian Americans in the academy, we are witnessing the final throes, albeit