Discriminations

“Minority professors on the tenure track aren't as satisfied with their academic workplace as their white counterparts are,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, based on a new study published by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard School of Education.

On many questions—including one on whether their academic department treats pretenure faculty fairly and equally—Native American faculty members were less positive than their white colleagues. On a five-point scale, with 5 meaning “strongly agree” and 1 meaning “strongly disagree,” the mean rating for Native Americans was 3.33, the lowest of all minority groups surveyed. The mean rating for Asian faculty members was 3.83, slightly higher than the 3.81 rating from white faculty members. Hispanic faculty members’ mean rating was 3.75, compared with African Americans at 3.6.

In one sense these responses are not surprising. A generation or more of racial preferences have done nothing to reduce the grievance gap, and in fact probably have accentuated it. But on another level they raise a couple of interesting questions:

• Minority faculty are less likely than whites to believe they have been treated “fairly and equally.” Could that mean that they are aware that racial preference played a role in their being hired?

• Do minority faculty believe that being treated “equally” is being treated “fairly,” or do they believe that in order to be treated fairly they must be treated preferentially?

It’s pretty clear that the authors of the study believe their findings support the conclusion that minority faculty should be treated better. But I suspect I’m not the only reader who believe these findings more strongly support the view that what minority faculty deserve is what all faculty deserve — to be treated by their institutions without regard to their race.