Racist to Assume Elites Routinely Hire Subpar Black Faculty

Last week, I heard the offensive, unverified claim that less qualified Black applicants bypass more qualified white candidates in faculty search processes. “Does this fool not understand what it takes for a Black person to get a job at one of these places,” I asked myself as I listened in disgust. A very small number of unqualified Black academics somewhere at some point in time may have gotten jobs they did not deserve. I do not know them.

What I do know is that this is definitely far from widespread, rare at best. Unlike me, many other people who listened to one person’s characterization of preferences allegedly given to Black applicants at one college where he worked four or five years as an untenured assistant professor are likely to generalize his reckless claims to most higher education institutions. They should not. That, too, would be foolish.

During the interview, I was also appalled by the grades universally assigned to candidates from different racial groups competing for the same academic jobs: A-minuses to scholars who are Black and A’s to applicants who are white. I have spent my entire 23-year faculty career at major research universities, including a decade at an Ivy League institution, where I earned tenure and was subsequently promoted to full professor. I have also served on several faculty search committees and cast votes in dozens of others. I have never once seen a so-called A-minus Black candidate be given a job. The very notion is ridiculous. My understanding of the truth about this is not only experiential and observational, it also is empirical.

In workplace-climate research studies I have conducted over the past two decades, one reality that I hear almost unanimously from Black professionals across dozens of industries, including higher education, is that hiring and promotion processes are indeed racially inequitable. Accordingly, Black people must be considerably more accomplished than their white counterparts in search and promotion processes. Many offer quantitatively confirmable examples. Hence, at the places I have worked and studied, the overwhelming majority of Black scholars, including myself, had to be A-plus candidates.

I am not a person who judges the greatness of a university by the number of student applicants it rejects or by its cumulative sum of research dollars. But I recognize that these are two popular determinants of what makes an institution seemingly elite. I will go along with these metrics herein to make a pair of important points.

For the past nine years, I have had the pleasure of working at the University of Southern California. Unfortunately, 89 percent of applicants for undergraduate admission here are not accepted. “Also in 2023, the university joined an exclusive group of just 13 private universities nationwide to surpass $1 billion in annual research expenditures,” Chinyere Cindy Amobi, associate editor of USC News and Trojan Family Magazine, reported in an article last summer. On these two metrics that the public has long deemed valuable, USC is indeed an elite, highly selective research university.

It is extremely hard to get a tenure-track faculty position here. Being promoted to associate professor with tenure and subsequently promoted to full professor are even more difficult. For five years, I served on the university-level tenure and promotion committee—three as chair of the social sciences panel and two as chair of the overall committee. It was such a rewarding experience because I was constantly reminded in each meeting how excellent the USC faculty is. Never once did we vote affirmatively to give a Black person tenure or promote them or forgive weaknesses in their cases because they were Black. Thankfully, we were never accused of such, at least not under my leadership.

A more important acknowledgment is that there are numerous A-plus USC professors who are Black: Pedro Noguera, Brendesha Tynes, Jessica DeCuir-Gunby, Franita Tolson, Camille Gear Rich, Percival Everett, Nada Elbuluk, Ricky Bluthenthal, Jody David Armour, Darnell Cole, Royel Johnson, Terry Allen, Ben Carrington, Allissa V. Richardson, Robin Stevens, Oneka LaBennett and Brittany Friedman are just a few among many. All of them could easily get jobs just about anyplace else. I hope they do not, because I really love having them all here.

USC is not the only place with A-plus Black scholars. I know hundreds of others who significantly enhance major research universities. The institutions that employ them, as well as their academic fields and our nation, undeniably benefit from their brilliance. Here is an alphabetized, unranked list of just a handful of the hundreds of A-plus Black geniuses at research universities whose scholarship I greatly admire.

1. Danielle Allen, Harvard University
2. Walter Allen, UCLA
3. Carol Anderson, Emory University
4. Elijah Anderson, Yale University
5. Dorinda Carter Andrews, Michigan State University
6. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University

7. Joshua Bennett, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
8. Lawrence Bobo, Harvard University
9. Cullen Buie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
10. Prudence Carter, Brown University
11. Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago
12. Tressie McMillan Cottom, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
13. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Columbia University and UCLA
14. Lori Patton Davis, UCLA
15. John B. Diamond, Brown University
16. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Emory University

17. Michael Eric Dyson, Vanderbilt University
18. Jennifer Eberhardt, Stanford University
19. Christopher Emdin, Columbia University
20. Eve Ewing, University of Chicago
21. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University
22. Joy Gaston Gayles, North Carolina State University
23. Jarvis Givens, Harvard University
24. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Princeton University
25. Mark Anthony Gooden, Columbia University
26. Kimberly Griffin, University of Maryland
27. Cheryl Harris, UCLA
28. Marc Lamont Hill, CUNY Graduate Center
29. Tyrone Howard, UCLA
30. John L. Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania
31. Toby Jenkins, University of South Carolina
32. Peniel Joseph, University of Texas at Austin
33. Randall Kennedy, Harvard University
34. Bettina Love, Columbia University
35. Ebony McGee, Johns Hopkins University
36. H. Richard Milner IV, Vanderbilt University
37. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Princeton University
38. Carla O’Connor, University of Michigan
39. Imani Perry, Harvard University
40. Melissa Harris Perry, Wake Forest University
41. Stephen John Quaye, Ohio State University
42. Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania
43. Janelle Scott, University of California, Berkeley
44. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Columbia University
45. Bryan Stevenson, New York University
46. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University
47. Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania
48. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Michigan
49. Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary
50. Maisha Winn, Stanford University

To be sure, I am in no way claiming these are the only or the 50 best A-plus Black scholars in the United States. This is mostly a handful of friends and collaborators who immediately came to mind as counterexamples of the ridiculous notion of A-minus Black academics at elite institutions. There are a few people on this list whom I have never met but have long admired their brilliance and massive scholarly contributions from afar. I know their work well enough to know that they were not A-minus candidates who were only hired because they are Black.

Along with them, I gratefully stand on the shoulders of retired yet still academically active Black geniuses who taught us what being an A-plus scholar at an elite institution requires: Gloria Ladson-Billings (University of Wisconsin), Edmund W. Gordon (Columbia University), Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford University), James Banks (University of Washington), Vanessa Siddle Walker (Emory University), Diana Slaughter Kotzin (University of Pennsylvania), Margaret Beale Spencer (University of Chicago), Carol Lee (Northwestern University), William Darity Jr. (Duke University) and Vivian Gadsden (University of Pennsylvania) are just a few among many.

The legendary Derrick Bell (Harvard University) likely convenes other Black A-plus scholars in heaven for faculty meetings, lectures and Black academic family reunions. Charles Vert Willie (Harvard University), Toni Morrison (Princeton University), Lani Guinier (Harvard University), Joseph L. White (University of California, Irvine), Kathy Phillips (Columbia University), Ernest Morrell (University of Notre Dame) and many other brilliant Black angels are among the icons seated at Bell’s heavenly table. None of us would have gotten to where we are had it not been for those and other A-plus Black scholars who now smile upon us from above. To refer to us as A-minus scholars is unforgivably offensive to those ancestors. I will not allow it.

“I am insisting that very smart people ought to be able to recognize hype for what it often is: attention-seeking, financially good for the speaking tour and leverageable for a book deal,” I wrote in yesterday’s article. Today, I insist that believing the hype that many unqualified Black professors at elite institutions only got our jobs because we are Black is racist. It most certainly is unsubstantiated. Don’t believe the hype of Black intellectual inferiority. All the A-plus scholars named in this article, along with the hundreds more I know, prove otherwise. I am proud of us. At the same time, I am repulsed by those who dishonor our legacies with bogus claims that we were given jobs we did not deserve.