Nathan Glazer Explains the Black Faculty Gap

Abstract

'ncreasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students, by the sociologists Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, argues that there are important negative consequences of the widespread effort by elite and selective institutions to admit black students whose academic achievements fall far below those of the majority of students admitted. These findings are especially newsworthy because the study was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the very same foundation that had supported the major study by William Bowen (its president, and the former president of Princeton) and Derek Bok (former presi' dent of Harvard) arguing just the opposite. Bowen and Bok's 1998 book, The Shape of the River, had presented a good deal of evidence supporting the value of preferences for black students, and gave no evidence that such policies had negative consequences for white or minority students. Indeed, Cole and Barber's study has been supported financially by that galaxy of institutions -Ivy League colleges and universities and major foundations that are uniformly in support of affirmative action in college and university admissions. / The idea for the study came out of discussions between Elinor Barber, then a research associate in the Nat provost's office at Columbia University, and Neil Rudenstine, then president of Harvard and a fervent supporter of affirmative action both in university admissions and in faculty recruitment. What, Rudenstine asked, could Ivy League institutions do to increase their numbers of minority faculty? This has been an important objective at all of the Ivies, as the number of black faculty in particular remained low despite efforts to increase their presence. Elinor Barber recruited Cole, who has done important work on the sociology of scientists, to join her in researching this question. The Council