Black Faculty at the Nation’s 30 Highest-Ranked Universities

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

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. Columbia University ranked second in our survey with a black faculty percentage of 6.2 percent. Many of the black faculty at Columbia are in the graduate and professional schools of the university.

The 279 black faculty members at the University of North Carolina made up 5.9 percent of the full-time faculty, the third-highest level in our survey. In total numbers, Chapel Hill had the most black faculty members.

At the University of Michigan, there are 145 black full-time faculty. They make up 5.4 percent of the full-time faculty on the Ann Arbor campus. Brown University is the only other high-ranking research university where blacks are at least 5 percent of the total full-time faculty.

At Notre Dame, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Wake Forest, and Yale, blacks are less than 3 percent of the total faculty. At MIT and CalTech — two universities which chose not to participate in this year’s survey — the 2005 JBHE survey found that blacks made up less than 3 percent of their faculties.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.