For the moment, though, I know that it’s a real concern for people. Black colleagues here I think feel a certain isolation, and what I described in the story about the faculty search process, that was VERY real.

I’d encourage more people of whatever race to give it a chance (if they can afford it). It’s a wonderful place in most respects.

I want to talk about something other than white or black, like humanity.

http://cyberlog.wordpress.com
http://chancellorbeverlyjones.wordpress.com

But the odd thing is, we are rarely approached by white students for research opportunities. All of our techs are minorities. And all of our students are minorities. In fact, most of our students are not American. I get 4-5 e-mails a month from PhD candidates or techs from India or China who want to come here to do research.

Granted, that’s a-whole-nother can o’ worms (to be debated at a later time), but my point is that the academic world is undergoing significant changes. And if race WAS an issue with hiring Churchill, it’ll be come less of a problem in years to come.

Theoretically.

Having also served on search committees at schools and tried to find capable minority candidates (something academia actually does, to its credit), I think about highly qualified candidates that I’ve helped turf in trying to diversify a university’s faculty. And I share your ambivalence – and your sense of what we would like to see versus what we do see – and your uneasiness about the process. It feels like it’s not fair to anyone – either to minority candidates tacitly asked to give up their culture for academic life and to sincere, well qualified candidates who end up losing out on posts simply because they’re not minorities….

And, like you, I have no useful solutions to this dilemma….

As a prof at a university that’s whiter than CU, I can say “Damn. Do I understand that dynamic.”

Thanks, Sam.

The thing that hurts the worst is that when you suggest that the dynamics result in certain groups getting an easy pass, it can’t help but damage how others in that group are viewed. And I want to be REALLY clear on this – I was privileged to know and work with some minority faculty at CU, and I was impressed by each of them. This is a situation that encourages us to think in tokenism terms, and I’m glad to say that none of my personal experiences supported the idea that the minority faculty who ARE there are substandard in any way.

This leads me to hope fervently that Churchill was a rare exception, although I’m convinced that the pressures I describe here are quite real.

Regarding President Brown’s statement — throwing figures around the way he did was beyond crass. In other words, there’s no Indian who’s worth almost a billion dollars.