Almost No Black Economists at the Nation's Leading Universities

A dozen years ago in 1994, one of the first faculty surveys conducted by the then-new JBHE found only 11 black economists teaching at the nation's 25 highest-ranked universities. In the ensuing 12 years, not much has changed.

In fact, the current JBHE survey was able to locate only eight black economists teaching at the undergraduate level at the nation's 30 highest-ranked universities. There were two black economists each at Tufts University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There was a single black economist on the faculty at Harvard University, Washington University in St. Louis, Brown University, and Georgetown University. Six of the eight black economists hold tenured faculty positions. It must be noted that there are undoubtedly other black economists at several of these institutions. But those economists may teach graduate-level courses at university business schools or other units such as the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard or the Hoover Institution at Stanford and are not affiliated with the undergraduate economics department at these universities.

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.