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Tenured Black Professors in the English Department of the Nation's 25. Highest-Ranked Universities
Blacks make up a respectable 6 percent of the 979 full-time English department faculty at the 25 highest-ranked universities. Of this group, 30 have tenure. Ten hold endowed chairs. Of the top 25 highest-ranked universities, only Carnegie Mellon has no black faculty member in its English department.
In most professions the representation of blacks has been severely limited. But not so in literature. From the pages lit on fire by Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright to the national popularity of contemporary writers such as Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Walter Moseley, and August Wilson, one can delight in the dazzling literary performances delivered by blacks in this century. Terry McWilliams' Waiting to Exhale stayed on The New York Times Best Seller List for 37 straight weeks in 1992 and 1993. In 1993, for the first time, three books by black authors were on the best seller list simultaneously: Maya Angelou's Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey, Sara and A. Elizabeth Delaney's Having Our Say, and Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall.
Yet it is something of a paradox that black achievements in literature have not been matched by an equivalent African-American representation among the ranks of literary scholars at America's highest-rated colleges and universities. All of the nation's 25 highest-ranked universities except the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have an academic unit formally designated as the "department of English."(*) Overall, there are 59 black English department faculty members at these 25 top-ranked universities, making up 6 percent of the total faculty. Although the percentage of black faculty in the English departments of these great universities is higher than the percentage of black faculty in most of their other academic departments, it appears that at many institutions blacks are underrepresented. For example, there are no black English professors at Carnegie Mellon University and only one each at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Rice, and Johns Hopkins.
One reason for the shortfall of black faculty in English departments is the declining numbers of black doctorates in the field. Data obtained from the Modern Language Association (MLA) shows that throughout the 1980s blacks...