Racism on American campuses is a matter of national concern again this week following protests at the University of Missouri at Columbia that led on Monday to theresignations of both the campus’s chancellor and the system’s president.
Protesters unhappy with the administration’s response to several incidents in which African-American students were the targets of racial slurs formed a group called Concerned Student 1950, a reference to the year the university admitted its first black student.
The protests, which included a graduate student on a hunger strike and gained traction after the university’s football team joined in, called for the resignation of the system’s president, Timothy M. Wolfe, who announced on Monday that he was stepping down. Several hours later, the chancellor of the Columbia campus, R. Bowen Loftin, resigned as well.
While the situation in Missouri is dramatic, and the protests there particularly successful, racial tensions have flared up on several campuses in the past year.
Those events draw attention to continuing racial disparities in higher education, where African-Americans make up a small portion of professors, presidents, and selective-college enrollments. Let’s take a look at some relevant data:
Disparities in Where Students Enroll
College enrollment is racially polarized. White students are overrepresented in selective colleges — which have more resources to educate and support them — while African-American students are overrepresented in less-selective institutions. The table below comes from a 2013 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, which also found that this polarization has grown more pronounced since the mid-1990s.
[For more of this story, written by Beckie Supiano, go to http://chronicle.com/article/R...ies-in-Higher/234129]
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