From the Department of Jaw-Dropping Data found while researching something else: An academic by the name of Boyce Watkins reports that nearly half of African-American students do not have a single African-American instructor during their time in college.

According to a recent survey taken at YourBlackWorld.com, with which Watkins is affiliated, 42 percent of all African-Americans who attended a predominantly white university never had a single black professor during four years of college. Nearly three-quarters of these students only had one black professor in a field outside of African-American studies.

“The presence of black faculty can make all the difference in the world when it comes to helping black students clearly visualize their personal goals,” Watkins says. “The lack of diversity on college campuses is a serious and persistent problem, and it serves to impede the likelihood of success for our children.”

If it’s true, it’s astoundingly bad news for higher education. Among other things, it suggests that high-achieving African-Americans who beat the achievement-gap odds during their K-12 years show up at college only to confront an aspiration gap.

And it would go along way toward explaining why college and university administrators continue to complain that their efforts at minority recruitment are continually stymied by a lack of candidates of color in the academic “pipeline.”

Multiple indicators
At the same time, I’m reluctant to re-report as statistically valid the outcome of what I’m guessing is a fairly small and informal survey. In the interest of context, then, I offer some other indicators that whatever the exact number, the number of African-American faculty African-American college students have contact with is abysmal.

According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, just over 5 percent of full-time faculty at U.S. colleges and universities are black. This percentage has increased slightly over the past decade, but the percentage of black faculty at the nation’s highest ranking universities lags significantly below the national average of 5.2 percent.

“Of the 26 high-ranking universities that responded to our survey this year, blacks made up more than 5 percent of the total full-time faculty at only five institutions,” the journal reported. “Emory University in Atlanta has the highest percentage of black faculty at 6.8 percent.”

Second place: Columbia University, where 214 of 3,477 faculty members are African-American.

Because of the historically black colleges and universities, published percentages of African-American faculty at the nation’s colleges and universities are inflated, the survey’s authors add. If the black schools are eliminated from the count, the total percentage nationwide declines to about 4 percent.

African-Americans made up 12.6% of enrollments
In 2009, African-Americans made up 12.6 percent of all enrollments in higher education. There were 1.2 million African-Americans enrolled in four-year undergraduate programs and 1 million in two-year community colleges.

In addition, there were 296,751 black students in graduate school. They made up 10.4 percent of all graduate school enrollments in 2009.

“Today there are more than 37,000 African-Americans teaching full-time at colleges and universities in the United States,” the journal reported. “But at the current rate of progress, it will take nearly a century and a half for the percentage of African-American college faculty to reach parity with the percentage of blacks in the nation’s population.”

In a separate survey, the journal found that the nation’s most highly selective liberal arts colleges have a far superior record in hiring black faculty than prestigious research universities. Of the 24 high-ranking liberal arts colleges responding to the survey, nine had black faculty levels of 5 percent or more.

Carleton, Macalester records
Two Minnesota schools showed up on the JBHE’s survey of 24 top liberal arts colleges: In 2007, 4.6 percent — or 11 — of Carleton’s 239 faculty members were African-American, as were 2.6 percent — or four — of Macalester’s 154. 

In 2005, the University of Minnesota reported that 4 percent of its full-time tenured faculty was faculty of color. In 2006, JBHE reported that 2 percent of U of M faculty was African-American.

The group’s findings jibe with numbers compiled by the Minnesota Minority Education Partnership. According to that group, Minnesota had 565 instruc­tors and tenured faculty of color in 2005, an increase over the previous decade of 30 percent. The largest growth was among foreign-born faculty at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus.