Legislative Black Caucus wants improvements
By Jerome Boettcher
For the St. Louis American
Missouri Legislative Black Caucus Chairman John Bowman might be new to his position, but it hasn’t taken him long to act and try to serve his community in regards to some important issues.
State Rep. Bowman and the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus recently requested information from the University of Missouri System regarding diversity among full-time, tenured professors, deans/assistant deans, and minority administrators (those who earn at least $50,000).
Custodian of Records David Russell responded with information regarding the ethnic make-up of full-time tenured faculty, deans and assistant deans, administrators and all students at the campuses in Columbia, Kansas City, Rolla and St. Louis as of Fall 2005.
“It turned out to be alarming,” Bowman said.
Among some of the notable statistics, there are only 27 African-American tenured faculty members at the University of Missouri-Columbia – just 3.3 percent of all faculty members. There are a total of 799 faculty members – 673 of them white.
At UMSL, just 20 of the total tenured faculty members are black. However, both outdo UMKC, which only has nine African-American tenured faculty members.
“UMKC is quite disturbing. They’re all pretty disturbing,” Bowman said.
Only 1,502 students at Columbia are African-American, just 5.3 percent of the campus. At UMKC, however, more than 10 percent of the student population is black.
UMKC recently took action about the problem, as it hosted a panel discussion on the campus regarding diversity issues. Bowman said because of the recent media attention, UMKC and the other campuses know they are “under the watchful eye.”
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Stephen Lehmkuhle said he knows the number of minority faculty is not proportionate to the number of minority students, not just at Columbia, but in general.
“That’s too low,” he said.
“Minority faculty in general – Hispanic, African-American, American Indian – are very difficult groups to recruit from. The pipeline is very small. All institutions of higher education are facing the same challenges, and as a result the market is very good for faculty from underrepresented groups – and as a consequence it is very difficult for us to recruit as well as retain minority faculty.
“As our student population diversifies, it is absolutely critical for us to continue to diversify the faculty. Role models are critical to increase the success rates of our underrepresented students. It would be to our advantage, everyone’s advantage, to have a more diversified faculty.”
Lehmkuhle said the University of Missouri System is taking action to fix this problem but said it’s not that easy.
“I wish it was just as simple as putting in more money or just recruiting harder. But it is not that simple,” he said.
“To be successful, we need to adopt different recruiting strategies, and be much more proactive and identify new faculty members even earlier in their education process.
“For example, the university should identify potential new faculty when they are graduate students and connect them with one of the University of Missouri campuses and groom that relationship, so we’re in much better position to recruit them or hire them when they do graduate. That’s a different strategy than what you would use for other new faculty. But recruiting and hiring minority faculty is just a very, very, very different and tough market.”
Lehmkuhle said if the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus wants to talk about the results, UM President Elson Floyd and others would be pleased to meet.
“I think they understand the challenges that are in front of us, but just because we know it’s hard, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to work harder and try to be more successful,” Lehmkuhle said.
“I know the Legislative Black Caucus would like to see us continue to diversify our faculty, student body and administrators. They’re asking these questions and that serves to reinvigorate our efforts and reminds us about the importance of doing this. I know that, for me, I welcome that reminder.”
Bowman said he saw Floyd recently and Floyd “immediately expressed that things could be better.”
Bowman said the request was a first step in a plan to try to make organizations in Missouri as diverse as the state’s population. He said the caucus thought that education was the ideal place to begin.
Bowman said the results, which he continually called disturbing, bring up many questions.
“Those campuses have such a lack of diversity. Is there some institutional race issue there?” Bowman said.
“We need to get answers. There’s a tremendous amount of work to do.”