Black Faculty Are Well Represented in Major Sociology Departments

The field of sociology includes issues of race, urban studies, and relations between different ethnic groups. So it should come as no surprise that the nation’s leading colleges and universities have hired a relatively large number of black scholars to teach the discipline at their institutions. In fact, blacks are a greater percentage of the total faculty in sociology than in perhaps any other discipline except African-American studies.

New data from Donna J. Nelson, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, has found 152 blacks teaching sociology at the 100 departments with the largest research budgets in the field. All told, blacks are 8 percent of all sociology faculty at these institutions.

Among the 152 black faculty in sociology are 68 women and 55 scholars who hold the rank of full professor. There are seven black sociologists at Michigan State University, the most of any of the top 100 sociology departments. There are five black sociologists at Virginia Tech and four each at Texas A&M University, UCLA, and the University of Texas.

Copyright © 2008. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.