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20 T. Marshall L. Rev. 45 (1994-1995)
A Proposal for the Hire and Tenure of Faculty of Color in Higher Education

handle is hein.journals/thurlr20 and id is 51 raw text is: A PROPOSAL FOR THE HIRE AND TENURE
OF FACULTY OF COLOR'IN HIGHER
EDUCATION
LYNN S. MUSTER*
Traditionally, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, men occupied the
field of higher education.' They wrote the textbooks that students read,
and they taught the classes in which the books were used. Moreover,
these men used their powerful positions to assure that other white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, men received associate teaching positions and
tenure at colleges and       universities.2 When     these men    distributed
positions in academia they distributed more than jobs and wealth. They
also distributed the power to influence those who will participate in
and decide the future: they controlled what America learned.3
The legacy of exclusive white control of educational resources can
still be seen in the large percentage of white men and women who hold
professorship positions and the few positions awarded to people of
color (encompassing all racial and ethnic groups apart from white ethnic
groups) at colleges and universities.4 The number of professors of color
in higher academia remains disproportionately lower than the total
population of people of color in American society, and often remains
lower than the number of students of color as well.5 This Note proposes
* J.D., Boston University School of Law, 1994. The author is an Associate at Petrucelly
& Nadler, Boston. I wish to thank my family for their tremendous support in my long battle
to say what needed to be said.
I. Peter Applebome, Goal Unmet, Duke Reveals Perils in Effort to Increase Black
Faculty, N.Y. Tiams, Sept. 19, 1993 at Al.
2. Duncan Kennedy, A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative Action in Legal Academia,
1990 DuKE L.J. 705, 732.
3. Id. at 714.
4. Id. at 717. Current statistics show black professors representing a small percentage
of college and university faculty. Nationwide, only 2% of the college professors outside
historically black colleges are black: Columbia 8.0%, Wellesley 7.0%, Mount Holyoke 6.7%,
Emory 5.7%, Bryn Mawr 4.5%, Duke 2.4%, Princeton 2.3%, University of Pennsylvania
2.0%, Stanford 2.0%, Yale 2.0%, Northwestern 2.0%, University of Chicago 1.8%, University
of Wisconsin at Madison 1.7%, Dartmouth 1.4%, Harvard 1.4%, Rice 1.3%. Applebome,
supra note 1. For law schools in particular, of 6,660 full-time law professors in the 1985-86
academic year, only 433, or approximately 6.5%, were minorities. (citing Memorandum 86-
57 from Association of American Law Schools Executive Director to Deans of Member Schools
(Sept. 5, 1986)). Also, those professors had an unusually high attrition rate. Darryl Brown,
Note, Racism and Race Relations in the University, 76 VA. L. REv. 295, 319 n.98 (1990).
5. According to the 1990 Census, 12.3% of the United States residents are black, 9.0%
are of Hispanic origin, 2.9% are of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, and 0.8% are Native
American.

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