Racial Diversity a Hot Topic at Stanford University

JBHE’s latest research shows that blacks make up about 3.2 percent of the total full-time faculty at Stanford University. This places Stanford in the middle of the pack among the nation’s 30 highest-ranked universities in its percentage of black faculty.

But a study by the Stanford Daily has found that blacks are nonexistent in many departments at the university, most notably in the natural sciences. The student newspaper found that no black scholar has ever had a faculty appointment in Stanford’s chemistry or mathematics department. Only one African American, the late Arthur Walker, has ever taught in the university’s physics department.

On another front, Cullen Buie, the co-chair of the Stanford Graduate Student Council Diversity Committee, has charged that the university is not doing enough to increase racial diversity among graduate students. He presented evidence at a campus forum which showed that only 3 percent of all graduate students at the university are black. But he charged that the university refused to release data on the racial makeup of the graduate student population in various departments. “The university just will not yield this data, probably because it is so bad,” Cullen told the Stanford Daily.

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