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American business schools, much like American businesses, have some catching up to do when it comes to minority hiring.
Stymied by a lack of minorities in the PhD pipeline and growing competition for minority faculty, progress in hiring African American, Hispanic American, and Native American faculty at U.S. B-schools has been slow. Bernard J. Milano, president of the PhD Project, an organization based in Montvale, N.J., that aims to increase the diversity of corporate America by increasing the diversity of business school faculty, says just 3.5 percent of B-school faculty and administrators come from such underrepresented minority groups. "When you think about the changing demographics of this country," Milano says, "that's tragic."
Since 1994, when the PhD Project launched, the number of underrepresented minorities-excluding Asian Americans-at U.S. business schools has more than tripled, from 294 to 1,061 in 2010. The number of underrepresented minority doctoral students grew from fewer than 175 to 385 over the same period, according to the PhD Project.
For B-schools, the lack of minorities among the faculty is a real problem, making it difficult to recruit minority students and to satisfy corporate recruiters seeking minority MBA talent."We like to be reflective of the world we live in," says Sachin Gupta, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of marketing at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management (Johnson Full-Time MBA Profile). "We want the community here to reflect diversity in the real world. This is important because it's what constituents-from students to recruiters-want."
Read more about minority business school faculty on BusinessWeek.com.