The Mobility of Black Collegiate Faculty Revisited: Whatever Happened to the "Brain Drain"?

Abstract

Nearly two decades after affirmative action pressures prompted White colleges and universities to begin aggressively recruiting Black faculty, the presence of Blacks in the American higher education professoriat remains problematic. Although the majority of Black faculty remain concentrated at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), research on career mobility within the academic profession is predisposed toward investigating those relatively few Blacks with faculty appointments at White institutions. The result is a relative paucity of empirical knowledge about the career mobility of Black collegiate faculty (Finkelstein, 1984). Moreover, during the 1970s some scholars argued that Black collegiate faculty had a significant advantage in the marketplace as measured by the number of job offers from White colleges and by salaries (Mommsen, 1974; Freeman, 1977). Allegedly this advantage was due to their Black skin. As a consequence of this increased mobility, a few scholars began to foresee a brain drain from HBCUs where most Black faculty were employed (Morris, 1972). Was such a situation aberrant or fundamental? Was it typical even of the early 1980s? This article reports the results of original survey research undertaken to explore these questions using a twice-stratified random sample of mobile faculty recruited to Black colleges during the 1981-82 academic year.