The shortage of non-white professors is a self-perpetuating problem

*Catch-22: report says here are few Latino PhD professors because there are few Latino PhD professors. VL

By Matt Krupnick,  The Hechinger Report/PBS (8.5 minute read)

Felecia Commodore came into her job search armed with a University of Pennsylvania doctorate in higher education and published research papers. But after a year of looking, she still didn’t have a job.

Commodore, who is black, couldn’t help but wonder whether race played a part as she was rejected from one college teaching job after another. So she toned down racial references in her cover letter — using the term “cultural communities” rather than “African-American communities,” for instance, to refer to one of her areas of study — and things took a turn for the better.

The experience left her conflicted.

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Only 6.4 percent of U.S. citizen or permanent resident research doctoral recipients in 2014 were black and 6.5 percent were Hispanic, according to the National Science Foundation. That’s the most recent year for which the doctoral recipient figures are available, and a much smaller proportion of both groups than their shares of the American population, which were 13.3 percent and 17.6 percent, respectively. READ MORE