Dartmouth is lacking in the area of minority faculty recruitment, but is working aggressively to improve, according to Dean of the Faculty Ed Berger. However, some professors think the College could be trying harder.
Friday's protest -- during which students gathered in front of Parkhurst Hall demanding changes be made to various aspects of life at the College -- served as a reminder for the administration that Dartmouth lags behind in numbers of minority faculty, Berger said.
However, the administration was already aware of the relative lack of racial diversity among faculty members, Berger said.
Contrary to the charges levied by the protestors, the College is aggressive in recruiting minority professors through advertisements in professional journals and by touching base with individual candidates themselves, he said.
"We do try to attract as many applicants as we can from underrepresented groups," he said. Berger conceded, however, that these efforts often fall short of the College's goals of achieving a more diverse faculty.
One professor told The Dartmouth he thinks the College could work harder to increase minority hiring.
"Even though Dartmouth is energetic in its attempts [to attract a diverse pool of professors] ... it's got to try harder than other places," English Professor William Cook, one of the African American members of the Dartmouth faculty, said.
"We are looking at one of the whitest states in the United States," he said, citing New Hampshire's racial composition as a large hurdle in Dartmouth's effort to attract minority professors.
Cook maintained, however, that Dartmouth's geographic disadvantage should serve as an impetus for even more aggressive minority recruitment on the part of the College.
Berger contended problems with minority hiring are in large part due to factors outside of the current administration's control, specifically, the College's controversial history with respect to race relations and its remote and racially-homogeneous location.
"Everyone who looks around campus recognizes that we have some real deficiencies ... in terms of representation."
In regard to campus race relations, Berger cited events such as the 1986 "shanty town incident" -- in which several students from the Dartmouth Review tore down a shanty town erected on the Green in protest of the South African apartheid -- as detrimental to the College's ability to attract minority professors.
The College's isolated, rural locale is the other major -- if not the primary -- obstacle in Dartmouth's pursuit of a more racially-mixed faculty, Berger said.
Minority professors tend to go to large public universities and are accustomed to diverse, urban landscapes, Berger explained.
"Dartmouth is a different kind of environment and a different kind of location," he said.
Sociology Professor Christine Gomez -- who admitted that the College's location made her "think twice" about joining its faculty -- feels that Dartmouth could stand to be more aggressive in recruiting minority professors, particularly in the government, math, and sociology departments.
However, she agreed with Cook that not all of the problems can be attributed to uncontrollable factors: "I feel that Dartmouth, as well as many other colleges could be doing a better job."
Other colleges are running into their own problems in terms of maintaining diverse faculties. Tufts University has faced criticisms similar to those aimed at Dartmouth in regard to the racial make-up of its faculty.
Recruiting professors from minority backgrounds is a difficult and "cutthroat" business, Tufts University Vice President of Arts, Sciences and Engineering, Mel Bernstein told the Tufts Daily. Competition for well-qualified minority professors is high, while the actual number of such professors is relatively low, he explained.
Indeed, a study done by the University of California at Los Angeles found that a major problem confronting higher education is that too few persons of color are earning doctoral degrees -- a qualification often essential for attaining faculty positions at elite colleges and universities such as Dartmouth.
The College has had some success in diversifying its faculty, particularly in the area of gender, Berger said, pointing out the fact that the College, with female professors making up over 30 percent of the faculty, has the highest such ratio in the Ivy League.
Berger also highlighted the relatively large size of the College's Native American faculty, calling it "above the crowd."
