Author Archives: E Wayne Ross

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: Black Faculty in Higher Education: Still Only a Drop in the Bucket

BHE surveyed the nation’s highest-ranked research universities, the most selective liberal arts colleges, and the 50 flagship state universities to determine their levels of black faculty. Overall, the liberal arts colleges have the most racially diverse faculties. Mount Holyoke College had the highest percentage of black faculty of any of the 100 colleges and universities surveyed.

Nationwide, just over 5 percent of all full-time faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are black. This percentage has increased slightly over the past decade. But the percentage of black faculty at almost all the nation’s high-ranking universities is significantly below the national average of 5.2 percent.

JBHE recently surveyed the nation’s highest-ranked universities to determine the number and percentage of blacks on their faculties. We received responses from 26 high-ranking universities. MIT and CalTech declined to provide updated data on their black faculty.*

This Year’s Results

Of the 26 high-ranking universities that responded to our survey this year, blacks made up more than 5 percent of the total full-time faculty at only five institutions. Emory University in Atlanta has the highest percentage of black faculty at 6.8 percent.

The Boston Globe: Letter he sent to Dershowitz cited as possible threat

An evolutionary biologist from Rutgers University said he was told that a talk he was scheduled to give at Harvard University Friday was canceled because he compared Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to a Nazi last week in a letter to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal.

The Chronicle: Method of Using Student Evaluations to Assess Professors Is Flawed but Fixable, 2 Scholars Say

Student evaluations of instructors are deeply imperfect tools that are often misused by college administrators — but the evaluations should not be scrapped, two scholars said here on Saturday at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Each scholar sketched a model for reforming the faculty-assessment system.

“At best, student ratings provide a weak measure of instructional quality,” said Anthony G. Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. “They’re heavily influenced by grades, and they’re also influenced by class size.”

Mr. Greenwald presented an analysis of the student ratings of more than 14,000 courses given at his university from 1997 to 2001. He was especially interested in exploring how average course ratings varied by department. Courses in Washington’s dance department, for example, typically received high student evaluations, while chemistry, physics, and mathematics courses tended to rate poorly.