UC San Diego - race/ethnicity

[guest]

Aug 25, 2011 1:51:01 GMT -5 @realist said:

...scholars of color when they still remain a rather small percentage of newly hired sociologists at almost every university and department?

Another way to look at it, though, is the proportion of grad students by race that get jobs. It could be that, say, an African-American graduate student is disproportionately likely, as compared to a white graduate student, to get a job. There's nothing wrong with that; I'm just saying that the issue might be more one of recruitment into grad school than recruitment into faculty positions. It might be easier to recruit African-American undergraduates to do graduate work in sociology if they knew they could be certain of a job when they finished.

[curious]

^ Is there any tangible data showing that graduate students of color are hired at higher rates than their white counterparts for faculty jobs? Or is that just a myth created by anecdotal evidence of bitter white graduate students who didn't get any jobs?

[eq]

Good point; it's definitely an empirical question. But why would someone have to be bitter to suggest it? I thought most of this thread was about the need for this. It sounds to me like there's consensus on this topic.

[Michigan law]

Well, I thought of the AA case at Michigan Law from a few years back, where a bitter white applicant thought a person of color took her rightful spot on the program. From my own perspective I did see that line of thought being used by myself (at the time) and my white friends when I was applying to undergrad. It was only later when I was actually at my top public R1 that I realized there were hardly any black students. To have had that fear and borderline bitterness at black applicants, then, makes me feel ashamed and so off-base now. Could something similar be the case here?

[data]

Interesting point. Also interesting: are POC more likely to be at lower-ranked grad programs? Are there any data on this? I interviewed at a variety of places and didn't notice any patterns, but that's not very systematic -- you don't get to meet that many grad students.