Service is not an optional part of being an assistant professor. The trick is knowing how to do enough without doing too much. In Part 1 of this series, the author enumerated the "good deeds" that assistant professors do in the realm of teaching that tend to blow up or backfire. He cautioned that, while doing good for students was their primary…

Last month the "Rocky Mountain News" reported that a survey by an emeritus professor at University of Colorado Boulder found that only 23 of 825 faculty members on the campus were registered Republicans. But on his "New York Times" blog, Stanley Fish brushed off the survey's significance from a familiarly Fishian stance. A faculty's political…

Every year the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida issues a report on minority hiring in college sports. And every report says basically the same thing: White men continue to hold the vast majority of the most-powerful positions in intercollegiate athletics. This year's report echoes the findings from…

Nationwide, minority and female faculty members were trailblazers in the 1960s and 1970s. Only in the past generation have most colleges adopted large-scale plans to diversify their faculties. This article revisited ambitious plans announced at five universities during the past two decades to see how they have fared. They are Duke University,…

Nearly 10 years ago, the author wrote an essay for "The Chronicle" on the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in academic leadership, especially in institutions and disciplines that have a high percentage of students and faculty members of Asian or Pacific Island ancestry. There have been changes over the past 10 years, but not so much for…

Proponents of "diversity hiring" insist that faculty members of color have a different perspective on issues of race and ethnicity that will increase students' understanding of the multiracial, multicultural world they will inhabit in the 21st century. The mere presence of "diverse" faculty members will prepare students for workplace realities,…

In 2005, 109,964 U.S. minority scholars held full-time faculty positions at American colleges and universities, up from 69,505 in 1995, according to the Education Department--a 58-percent increase. The proportion of minority scholars in the overall professoriate also rose, but not as much. The department found that 16.5 percent of scholars were…

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) recently commissioned a study to review the research that finds liberal bias run amok in academe. Believing that the AFT is not a dispassionate observer of this debate, this article provides "The Chronicle of Higher Education's" survey of the genre. The studies reviewed include: (1) "Political Bias in the…

Describes a new book that argues that faculties lack diversity in part because affirmative action has led many minority students to enroll at colleges where they do not do well enough to go on to Ph.Ds. (EV)

A recent study shows that half of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I-A football players are black, compared with 18% of coaches. Few blacks are head coaches. Coaches and administrators offer two suggestions for increasing numbers of black coaches: encouraging presidents and athletics directors to extend search lists, and…

Explores how Virginia Tech's aggressive push to hire female and minority professors has led to questions about its fairness and legality. (EV)

Discusses how British students and faculty members from ethnic minority groups are calling on universities to do a better job of including them. (EV)

Of the black athletic directors in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, 20 work at historically black institutions. Black athletes, however, have a large presence overall in these programs. One black administrator sees significant challenges in both hiring black directors and performing crucial aspects of the job, such as…

According to this author, by now everyone in America has learned to celebrate diversity. People do so to signify that they are a good person, they are hip, trendy, and "down with the program." He claims, however, that in academe, the word "diversity" still functions as a rhetorical trump card, always uttered with the tonal…

In a bitter battle over faculty diversity, students at the progressive New School for Social Research (New York) have held administrators hostage, staged a hunger strike, and denounced professors as racist. At issue is retention of the only black woman professor, a visiting scholar. An effort since 1990 to add minority scholars and students is…