Racial Disparities in Academia

I have been giving this issue a lot of thought lately, and I would like to make some remarks concerning the number of Black faculty in higher education. Bear with me, as some of what I am saying is conjecture! But keep in mind that I have given the matter many hours of investigation and consider it to be of the utmost concern for all academics.

There are many aspects to the issue of Blacks' underrepresentation in tenured positions at top universities and research institutions. I am going to attempt to adopt an entirely positive, rather than normative approach, and just try to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we observe what we observe without the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality. It is, after al,l not the case that the role of Blacks in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group.

The first hypothesis, which I think is the most plausible, is that academia is lifestyle choice which some people are more willing to make than others. I call this the high-powered job hypothesis. What fraction of young Blacks in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? What fraction of young Caucasians make a decision that they're unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young Black person who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. He reports that of his first year section, there were twenty-two Blacks, of whom three are working full time at this point. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just, who wants to do high-powered intense work?

The second hypothesis is relatively simple, but goes a long way towards describing the data. I call thsi the human varience hypothesis. It does appear that in many, many different human attributes - height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability - there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means, there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a Caucasian versus a Black population. That is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly culturally determined.

Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences. If you look at the race ratios in the top 5% of twelfth grade standardized test scorers, you will see less than one Black person for every two Caucasians. Now, it's been pointed out by various people that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability in the long term. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right, and there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well.

So my sense is that the unfortunate truth (I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true) is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

Think about it. There is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little black kids and little white kids. Somehow little black kids are inclined towards music and basketball, and little white kids are inclined towards books and engineering. Most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. For example, the confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong.

The human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true. When there were no black kids majoring in chemistry, when there were no black kids majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are twenty, or when people are twenty-five, in terms of their patterns, and the rate at which they drop out of the pipeline.

The most controversial question, and the most difficult question to judge, is what is the role of discrimination? To what extent is there overt discrimination? Surely there is some. Much more tellingly, to what extent are there pervasive patterns of passive discrimination and stereotyping in which people like to choose people like themselves, and the people in the previous group are disproportionately Caucasian, and so they choose people who are like themselves, who are disproportionately Caucasian. No one who's been in a university department or who has been involved in personnel processes can deny that this kind of taste does go on, and it is something that happens, and it is something that absolutely, vigorously needs to be combated.

However, if it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

Let me just conclude by saying that I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can.

Finally, my question to you is: do you think I am qualified to be the public face of a top-tier academic and research institution? By which I mean, does my presenting these hypotheses based on scientific conjecture, even though they may be unpopular or controversial, make you leery of my representing you as a fellow intellectual academic?