No African-American Scholar Has Ever Been Granted Tenure at the University of Tampa

By 1993 there were only two blacks on the 130-member faculty at the University of Tampa. Neither was tenured. In the late 1990s Arthur O. Hollist was awarded tenure as an associate professor of English. Professor Hollist is a native of Sierra Leone.

To this day, Hollist remains the only black scholar to hold tenure at the University of Tampa. Since Dr. Hollist is from Africa, no African American has ever been promoted to tenure at the University of Tampa. Today there are 80 academics who are in tenure-track positions but have not yet gone through the tenuring process. Not one of these 80 tenure-track scholars is black.

Blacks make up about 6 percent of the 4,100-member undergraduate student body at the University of Tampa.

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