A couple weeks ago, President Nelson issued a joint statement with the NAACP condemning racial injustice. Toward the end of that statement, they said:
We likewise call on government, business, and educational leaders at every level to review processes, laws, and organizational attitudes regarding racism and root them out once and for all.
(Emphasis mine.) It occurred to me that, while at BYU-P, very few of my professors were people of color. (It’s been a couple decades, so my memory isn’t perfect, but as best I can remember, I had two Brazilian professors, which is probably the closest I came.) I wondered what BYU faculty looks like today.
It isn’t pretty.
A quick acknowledgment and a caveat here. First, the acknowledgment: while academia writ large says it believes in inclusion, we haven’t been spectacularly successful at implementing that inclusion. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 76% of full-time faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions are white. By contrast, in the broader US population, only about 60% of us are white non-Hispanic. Six percent of full-time faculty are Black, while more than 13% of the general population is.
This is inexcusable. And it doesn’t get any better if we compare it to the demographics of college students. About 53% of undergrads are non-Hispanic white, while slightly over 15% are Black. Among grad students, about 61% are non-Hispanic white, while slightly over 12% are Black.
If academia at large lacks diversity as compared with the broader population, BYU really lacks diversity. I looked through most (maybe all?) of the faculty pages on BYU’s website to look at the number of women and faculty of color. I only counted full-time faculty who were full professors, associate professors, and assistant professors. Why? I wanted to focus on the full-time hiring, and I wanted to focus on the most prestigious roles in the university. That means I didn’t count, for example, visiting professors or Teaching Professors. (Why didn’t I count Teaching Professors? Because I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I suspect it’s something like a Lecturer at other schools—a non-tenure-stream position.)
And here’s the caveat: I based my evaluation of race primarily on the faculty member’s appearance. Sometimes, that’s not a good marker. It’s clearly possible that I counted someone as white who was actually a faculty member of color or vice versa. Mostly, I think my visual pick is right, but I may be slightly off. (Gender was presumably easier—because of BYU’s policies, I suspect that gender presentation in a faculty photo was accurate.)
And the (unscientific) results? Of the 1,042 faculty I looked at, 213 are women and 35 are faculty of color. (You can see my breakdown by department or school here.[fn1])
In other words, a fraction more than 20% of BYU’s faculty are women. (About 46% of full-time faculty nationwide are women.) And just over 3% (3.36% to be precise) are non-white and/or Latinx.
Some departments do better than others, of course. More than 67% of nursing faculty are women (though only 2.5% are faculty of color). And 73% of the dance faculty are women (with 20% faculty of color!).
That 20% of dance faculty is by far the high for faculty of color, though. Four other units that I measured have double digits. A full 24 of the 39 units I counted didn’t have a single faculty member of color. Of the 125 faculty members in the business school that I counted, two were faculty of color. Two.
The worst department for diversity though? Geography. Of the 12 tenure-stream faculty, there was not a single woman or person of color.
And look, even if we don’t want to use the U.S. population or general faculty as our comparison, BYU still doesn’t look very good. About 81% of the BYU student body is white non-Hispanic. And the student body is about 50/50 female-male.
Does the racial and gender composition of the faculty matter? Absolutely. It provides role models for students, and provides diverse voices and experiences that will allow students to better navigate their post-college life, among other things.
But even if it didn’t have practical benefits, our prophet demanded that we root out racism at every level, including the educational level.
Even if nobody at BYU is actively racist (and honestly, none of the faculty I know there is), BYU’s system of hiring suffers from significant systemic racism (and systemic gender discrimination). Systemic racism doesn’t require that the school actively try to discriminate—the systems that make it harder for people of color and for women to get faculty jobs have been in place for a long time.[fn2] To dismantle them—to root out this systemic racism—will take active effort by BYU.
Because faculty of color don’t just magically appear. And their lack at BYU isn’t just because there aren’t enough people of color with Ph.D.s. It’s in part because of BYU’s hiring policies. I’m not privy to most of its hiring policies, so I don’t know all of the impediments. I do know, though, that by default, faculty is likely to hire faculty that went to their same schools, that share their values, and who look like them.[fn3]
And who looks like BYU faculty? Pretty much white men.
“But wait!” you say. “BYU basically only hires Mormons, and there aren’t that many Mormons of color who have the qualifications to teach at BYU.”
I have no idea if there are Mormons of color with the credential BYU is looking for. But assume that there aren’t: BYU made the deliberate decision to hire only Mormons. If that policy keeps professors of color out, it’s the result of a deliberate choice BYU made, a deliberate choice that entrenches racial discrimination. If that’s the problem, BYU needs to evaluate that policy against the prophetic directive to root out racism in education.
It’s not impossible. It’s also not easy. But it’s a critical move, one that BYU needs to make to move to a place of racial justice.
[fn1] I realize that sometimes I counted by the school level, sometimes at the department level. How I did it depended on how the school or the department listed faculty pictures. Frankly, the most annoying was the School of Business, where I had to click on every single name (125 of them!) to see faculty pictures.
[fn2] Same with discrimination against the LGBTQ community.
[fn3] My friend, the pseudonymous lawprofblog, wrote this about law school faculty hiring: “The goal? Hire a candidate who looks and acts exactly like them. Just kidding. But that is often what happens. Because law professors tend to suck at hiring. Don’t get me wrong, you deserved to be hired. But most of us who don’t fit a particular pattern or mold often feel like we were some sort of accident or fluke. The reason is that law schools lack diversity.” (Note that in deference to lawprofblog’s strongly held opinion, I included two spaces after each period in the quotation.)