What's Wrong With This Picture?
Is KU a diverse workplace? Is KU a workplace where women and minorities can hope to succeed? The statistics listed below are from reports compiled by the KU Office of Institutional Research and Planning.
More than a third of the University of Kansas faculty are white males in the rank of full professor. A full 58% of this faculty are tenured white males. There are ten times as many white male full professors than there are minority women at all ranks. Although white males comprise only about 35% of the US Population, they make up 66% of the KU faculty. See the chart.
Minorities | Women
Minority Students | Tenure
What it means
NOTE: For 1999, the US Census Bureau estimates the percentage of females among the total US population to be 51% and the non-white percentage of the population to be 28%.
Minorities
The numbers of minority men and women have remained relatively unchanged for twenty years. In 1981, minorities made up 6.5% of the faculty. In 1999, minorities made up 14.6%. So in twenty years, we've increased the representation of minorities by only about 8%--which averages out to be an increase of only .4% per year. And we are still at about half the US minority representation. See the chart.
In 1995 Chancellor Hemenway proclaimed that KU should have 200 minority faculty by the year 2000. Since then, the number of minority faculty increased from 100 to 125, a rate of five per year. At this rate, it will take until the year 2015 to reach Hemenway's goal. He challenged his administrators to do it in five years and at their rate, it will take twenty years. See the chart.
At this rate, KU will have a minority faculty percentage equal to today's minority US percentage in the year 2032. But by then, that US percentage is expected to increase dramatically.
This lack of progress cannot be attributed to a lack of opportunity. In the six years since Hemenway's challenge, 290 new faculty were hired. Of this number, only 63 of the hires were minority faculty. The 75 additional minority faculty needed to make it up to 200 would only have represented another 26% of those hired.
Unfortunately, not even this would have worked because of the problems with retention of minority faculty. The increase in the number of minorities hired in recent years has been offset by attrition among the minority faculty. As a result, there has only been a net increase of 36 minorities in the past six years--only about half of the number that were hired.
For the current year, four minority women were hired. But, four minority women were terminated. So for this year, KU will not increase its minority women at all.
The actual number of minority women is only 33. Most KU classes are about that size. In the 1998-1999 academic year, more than 10% of the minority women were terminated.
There is also a disturbing lack of progress in hiring African American and Hispanic male faculty. Last year, KU lost 3 African American male faculty, so KU is now "up" to a grand total of only 14 African American males on the faculty. In the five years since Hemenway, he has increased the number of African American males on the faculty by one. In twenty years, there has been a net increase of only 4 African American males on this faculty. See the chart. The number of Hispanic male faculty has risen by only 10 in twenty years. See the chart.
Only the Asian American male faculty has significant real numbers. But in twenty years, they have increased only by 19 men. See the chart.
Overall the number of African Americans on the KU faculty has only increased by five in five years. See the chart. The percentage of African Americans in the US population is 12.8%. The percentage of faculty at KU who are African American is only 2.6%. We have 1030 faculty in 1999, so we need to increase from 27 African American faculty to 132 to match the US population.
At this rate it will take 105 years for the proportion of African Americans on the KU faculty to equal the proportion of African Americans in the current US population.
The number of minority women on campus is extremely low, and barely rising. Although 20 minority women have been hired since Chancellor Hemenway's arrival, six have been terminated (30%). In fiscal year 2000 there was no net addition of minority women, because hires exactly balanced terminations. This represents a "revolving door" for minority women faculty and librarians. See the chart.
When broken down by ethnicity, some disturbing trends can be seen. The number of Asian American women on the faculty and library staff is actually decreasing, despite a sharp increase in the enrollment of Asian American undergraduates at KU. See the chart.
KU has only 13 African American women on the tenured/tenure track faculty. The number of African American women did not change for more than 10 years, and only recently has there been any increases. Even though KU could claim an increase of 433% in the past 20 years, that represents only 10 African American women. See the chart.
In the early eighties, there were no Hispanic female faculty. Now KU's Hispanic female faculty number has skyrocketed to 9 women. See the chart.
The number of Native American women on the faculty is too low to graph. With the recent resignation of Luci Tapahonso, there is only one Native American woman on the faculty.
There are only 41 minority full professors at KU (4% of the faculty) and of these, only 4 are women.
White men also dominate the hires at KU at about the same rate. With the exception of the hiring freeze in 1997, there have been between 24 and 44 white male faculty and librarians hired each year. Since Chancellor Hemenway arrived on campus in 1995, approximately half of all faculty hired have been white men. See the chart.
Women
With only 25%, KU has a lower percentage of women on its faculty than any other Kansas institution. See the chart.
There are currently 734 tenured and tenure-track men on the KU faculty, and only 244 women. This is a ratio of 3:1 in favor of male faculty. Since 1981, the percentage of women on this faculty has risen from a pitiful 14.5% to a slightly less pitiful 25%. So in twenty years, we've increased the representation of women by only about 11.5%--which averages out to be an increase of a little more than .5% per year. See the chart.
At this rate, KU will have a female faculty percentage equal to today's female US population percentage in the year 2044.
However, since Chancellor Hemenway took over, he has reduced the rate of increase of women faculty by almost half. In the five years prior to 1995, KU added an average of about 8 women per year. In the five years since Chancellor Hemenway took over, we have added an average of only a little more than 4 women per year.
During the past decade there has been no real change in the proportions of men and women hired at KU. Men make up between 60% and 70% of the hires, women a mere 30-40% of hires. Chancellor Hemenway has done nothing to change this; since his arrival 229 faculty have been hired, 63% of whom are men (a ratio of almost 2:1 in favor of men). See the chart.
In the five years proceeding Chancellor Hemenway's arrival, 87 white women were hired by KU. In contrast, only 65 have been hired in the five years since his arrival. This represents a 25% decrease in the number of hires. This decrease is not due to a lack of new hires, since 113 white men have been hired since the Chancellor's arrival.
If the retention of women faculty was equal to that of men, then we might expect the faculty to settle into a 2:1 ratio of men to women, an improvement over the current 3:1 ratio on the faculty. But the probability that a woman will leave before going through tenure is much higher (twice the rate of men) and the probability of getting tenure is much lower.
The numbers for women promoted from Associate Professor to Professor show the same trend as the overall faculty numbers. During the five years prior to Chancellor Hemenway taking over, an average of 2.4 women were promoted to Professor per year. Since Hemenway took over, the average is 1.6 women promoted to Professor per year.
Since Hemenway arrived at KU, 120 men and 68 women have been awarded tenure. This means that only 36% of the number of faculty awarded tenure have been women.
Since Hemenway, 15% of the women and only 9% of the men have been denied tenure, which means that women are 1.7 times more likely to be denied than men.
Alas, there is equity in one category. Since Hemenway, 12 men and 12 women have been denied tenure. 50% of the faculty denied tenure have been women.
What's also disturbing is that the pool from which female applicants for promotion are coming--the number of female Assistant Professors--has actually dropped by two under Hemenway's leadership.
Minority Students
During the 5 years since Chancellor Hemenway took over, the enrollment of minority students has dropped by 76 students. The rate of change has dropped from an increase of 120 students the year Hemenway took over to a loss of 28 students in 1999. See the chart.
During the past 15 years, the number of African American students at KU has decreased from 798 (1984) to 701 (1999). This represents a decrease of 12%. Chancellor Hemenway has failed to stop this negative trend: when he arrived in 1995 there were 735 African American students on campus, now there are only 701 (a decrease of 5% in only 5 years). See the chart.
Tenure
By following the cohorts of faculty hired between 1988 and 1993, a disturbing trend is revealed: the proportion of women hired who are achieving tenure has drastically declined in recent years. The proportion of women (50%) is now well below the proportion of men (72%). See the chart.
Women hired in 1991-1993 were eligible for tenure during 1996-1999, and so would have been reviewed during Chancellor Hemenway's time at KU. Women hired during the period 1988-1990 would have come up for tenure before the Chancellor's arrival. There has been a decrease from a three year average of 79.6% tenured to 64.4% tenured since his arrival. It is important to note that the percentage of women tenured has been steadily decreasing since his arrival, while the percentage of men tenured has remained stable. See the chart.
During the past three years, 40 women have come up for tenure, nine have been denied (18.4%). During the same period, 67 men came up for tenure, six were denied (8.2%).The proportion of women denied tenure was more than twice that of men. See the chart.
This means that 61 men but only 31 women were added to the ranks of tenured faculty, maintaining the 2:1 ratio of men to women on the faculty and doing nothing to correct the current inequality. See the chart.
On average, half as many women (9.9/yr) have been tenured each year, compared to men (19.8/yr). See the chart.
NOTE: We would provide you with the tenure numbers for minority faculty, but the University won't disclose the numbers. You can just imagine why not.
What it all means
The mere fact that the numbers of women and minorities on our faculty are increasing is not an overriding concern in assessing the effectiveness of AA/EO policies at the university. Even under low to moderate levels of overt discrimination, minority and women faculty numbers would be expected to increase because of the large pool of qualified women and minorities applying for positions in the current academic job market. Unless the level of discrimination was extraordinarily high, we would not expect an actual decrease at KU. So, in other words, even if the University doesn't do a thing to increase minority and female hires, there would be a modest increase, as has been shown.
Instead, it is the rate of increase that should be carefully examined. This rate of increase is everything and determines whether the University will ever really reach equity numbers. If we were to add 2 minority faculty per year, it would take another 37.5 years for us to reach the Chancellor's goal of 200. If, say, we added 5 minority faculty per year it would only take 15 years to reach his goal. Ten per year would get us there in only 7.5 years.
This is why a good way to look at rates is in terms of the number of years it will take to reach a goal. If reaching the goal will give us a true benefit, then the faster we get there the better. If having 200 minority faculty at KU gives us something we want, then we should want to reach that goal quickly. Reaching this goal in say seven or eight years, which is only a couple of generations of undergraduates, should be better than taking the equivalent of an entire professional life span to experience a campus with 200 minority colleagues on the faculty.