Philosopher Jason Stanley (Yale) recently remarked on Twitter that in 20+ years, he had taught at four leading departments--Cornell, Michigan, Rutgers, Yale--and had only one Black colleague on tenure-track during that time (Howard McGary at Rutgers, who is now retired). I'll return to the question of causation and racism (which seems to have overwhelmed the online discussion [and here]), but the facts are indisputable. Very few of the leading PhD programs have any Black faculty, and even fewer have African-American faculty. I list below the "top 24" PhD programs with the names of their Black tenure-stream faculty, when there are any. Please e-mail me with any corrections.
NYU: Anthony Appiah
Rutgers: Derrick Darby
Princeton: ---
Michigan: ---
Pittsburgh: ---
Yale: ---
MIT: ---
Harvard: Tommie Shelby
Berkeley: ---
UCLA: ---
Stanford: Juliana Bidadanure
Columbia: Robert Gooding-Williams, Michelle Moody-Adams
Southern Cal: ---
North Carolina: ---
CUNY Grad: Charles Mills
Notre Dame: ---
Texas: ---
Brown: ---
Cornell: ---
U Arizona: Joseph Tolliver
UC Irvine: ---
UC San Diego: Michael Hardimon, Monique Wonderly
U Chicago: Anton Ford
U Wisconsin: ---
So 14 of these 24 leading programs have no Black faculty, and only 2 have more than one Black faculty member.
The online discussion that ensued seemed to trade on the problem we've noted before, namely, inconsistent understandings of "racism". What surely explains the paucity of Blacks is what this author called "Type 3" racism, i.e, the lingering effects of racist policies of the past--which is wholly different from the ordinary meaning of the word "racist" (what the author calls "Type 1," racism, i.e., "prejudice and discrimination based on ideas of racial superiority and inferiority").
Think of it this way: the U.S. is only about two generations removed from the end of de jure racism in its laws and institutions; it is perhaps a generation removed from the worst effects of de facto discrimination that persisted even after changes in the laws. There are still plenty of racists in the ordinary or Type 1 sense out there, but they no longer wield the main levers of power in most of our institutions (political, economic, educational, cultural). But the effects of when the Type 1 racists ruled are still with us everywhere, as racial disparities in wealth and educational attainment attest.
There is a further question whether there are philosophy-specific factors that explain the dearth of Black faculty. Some have proposed hypotheses that don't seem very illuminating given the data: e.g., philosophy awards more PhDs to African-Americans than English, Physics, Comparative Literature, Classics, Music, and Spanish (among others), but fewer than Chemistry, Psychology, Communications, and Sociology (among others). Rather than worrying about relatively minor issues like how many Blacks are teaching at elite philosophy departments, it might make more sense to support systemic economic policies that reduce the wealth and educational attainment gap, and not only for Blacks. Until then, initiatives like the one created by Professor McGary at Rutgers (and described by Rutgers philosopher Alex Guerrero here) will no doubt continue to make an incremental difference.
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