Thursday, November 12, 2015

Race and Faculty

There's this neat FiveThirtyEight analysis of the Mizzou issue and the demand by protesters that staff and faculty there reach 10 percent African American. By these numbers, FiveThirtyEight figures Mizzou would need to hire 400 more black staff and faculty.

OK, so how about UGA?

Using the latest data available on faculty race and ethnicity (Fall 2014), below is the faculty breakdown. I'll comment further below.

Race/Ethnicity
Faculty Percent
American Indian
  0.3
Asian
  9.2
Black
  5.3
Hispanic
  4.3
Multi-racial
  0.5
White
78.6
Not Reported
  1.8

So UGA falls far behind the protester mark. Now this is just faculty, it does not include staff. Unfortunately, I don't have ready access to race/ethnicity data for staff. I'll look harder later. So if UGA wanted to reach 10 percent of faculty, how many African American faculty would it need to hire? Glad you asked. As of now, 109 of 2,061 faculty are black. Hire another 109 black faculty -- in other words, double what we have -- and you'd hit 10 percent.

Not gonna happen for all kinds of reasons, the main one being there's no way we're getting the money to hire another 109 faculty, and you can't purposely hire only black faculty, and there aren't anywhere near enough organic faculty openings to make a difference.

But what the hell, I'm just running the numbers.




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