integrating sociology: observations on race and gender relations in sociology graduate programs

INTEGRATING SOCIOLOGY:OBSERVATIONS ON RACE AND

GENDER RELATIONS IN SOCIOLOGYGRADUATE PROGRAMS

MARY ROMERO*School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University

ERIC MARGOLISDivision of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies,

College of Education, Arizona State University

ABSTRACT: Issues related to the integration of race within sociology doctoralprograms were explored. Two sets of data were analyzed: open-ended interviews with26 women of color graduate students and 92 questionnaires completed by Ph.D.programs on faculty, graduate courses, and expertise in race. Quantitative data showthat faculty of color are likely to be the one member of their race in the department.EuroAmerican faculty are over-represented in the rank of Full Professor and Asso-ciate Professor and faculty of color are under-represented in the tenured ranks. Lessthan a quarter of departments included the study of race in required theory courses.Departments listing race and ethnicity as a specialty in the area did not always offergraduate courses in the field and courses that were offered did not necessarily focusspecifically on U.S. race/ethnic/minority relations, but included international studiesand broad topics in social organizations and stratification. Comments by a sample ofwomen of color graduate students point out a number of critical issues: curricula thatare outdated, ignore race, are monocultural, and look better in the catalog than in theclassroom; faculty that are top-heavy with older White males; students discouragedfrom pursuing what attracted them to the academy in the first place; and students inconflicts with racial overtones over scarce resources and favors. Qualitative results

*Direct all correspondence to: Mary Romero, Arizona State University, School of Justice Studies, P.O. Box870403, Tempe, AZ 85287-0403.

RACE & SOCIETY, Volume 2, Number 1, pages 1–24.Copyright © 2000 by Elsevier Science Inc.All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.ISSN: 1090-9524.

show that women of color graduate students perceive the inclusion of students andfaculty of color to include an acceptance of their racial and ethnic experience in theintellectual and social culture of the department. They linked the goal of integration ofthe student body and the faculty to be inseparable from integration of race into thecurriculum in both required and nonrequired courses, and assigned readings.

INTRODUCTION

Sociology departments are units of the university that are legally obligated to eliminatediscrimination in the selection of students as well as in the hiring, retention, and promotionof faculty. Departments must also confront the inequalities of past training, hiring, andpromotional policies that contribute to the under-representation of sociologists and pro-fessors of color.1 But that alone is not sufficient for the discipline that studies socialstratification and social change. Precisely because our business is the study of society,sociology must confront racism and discrimination along substantive dimensions as well.The study of race is a central element of the theoretical, methodological, and concreteempirical work of the discipline. Thus, sociologists have a special duty to eliminate racismand discrimination in the content of our research and writing. And, since we take fullresponsibility for the graduate training of future sociologists, race needs to figure prom-inently in our teaching as well. This requires an ongoing evaluation of the entirecurriculum: the range of course offerings and content, reading lists, paradigms andcomparative theoretical perspectives, student mentoring practices, and exams or evalua-tion strategies.

Thus, what appear analytically as separate areas—integration of the faculty and studentbody, and integration of the content of sociology—are inseparable. Both types of inte-gration are necessary if we are to include voices of difference that have been faint or silentin the past. Emerging perspectives including Black feminist thought, postcolonial dis-course, racial formation and critical race theory testify to the fact that sociologists of colorhave much to contribute to the discipline’s theories, methods and empirical work. Equallyimportantly to the legal and scholarly requirements, integration has a symbolic dimension.In the concrete life of departments, the composition of the faculty and graduate studentcohorts, their teaching styles, inclusion of race in the curriculum, works cited, and so onfunction as signs of the commitment to the study of race and openness to raciallyintegrating the discipline.2

Since the Civil Rights Movement, several sociological associations have expressedinterest in the status of women and minority graduate students and faculty. The AmericanSociological Association (ASA) established a Minority Fellowship Program in 1974. TheASA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession issued a number of publica-tions on the topic. Reports include “Guidelines for Incorporating Women Faculty intoSociology during the Eighties” (ASA, 1984), “Equity Issues for Women Faculty inSociology Departments” (ASA, 1985a), “The Treatment of Gender in Sociology” (ASA,1985b), and “Recommendations on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Sociolo-gists” (ASA, 1986). The Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) similarly conductedsurveys and produced reports on the status of women in the region (Araji et al., 1988;Kulis and Miller, 1988; Nigg and Axelrod, 1981). John Stanfield (1988) edited a specialissue ofThe American Sociologiston “Racial Diversity in Becoming a Sociologist.”

2 RACE & SOCIETY Vol. 2/No. 1/1999

Sociological associations have addressed issues of affirmative action and inclusionthrough the development of such programs as minority graduate student fellowships,summer research institutes, race and ethnic sections, and councils.

There have been few studies on the status of sociologists of color since Blackwell andJanowitz’s (1974) book on African American sociologists published a quarter of a centuryago. The growing literature on the sociology of sociology recognizes processes andstructures that contribute to the reproduction of mainstream sociology, but rarely doresearchers attend to the implications for students, faculty, or scholars of color. Mostdiscussions of professional identity assume a White, middle-class, heterosexual, maleprofessional identity (Aisenberg and Harrington, 1988; Gilkes, 1982; Granfield, 1992).Recently, two sociology journals devoted special issues to graduate education; however,neither included an article devoted to issues of race.3 Attention to gender issues hasaddressed ways that professional socialization affects White women in graduate schooland in the profession (Bernard, 1990; Gordon, 1990; Orlans and Wallace, 1994), but notstudents or faculty of color, particularly women of color. The special issue ofTeachingSociology on graduate training included a discussion on the status of women andminorities in the profession, but did not address practical issues of how to handle racismand sexism as a graduate student or later as a faculty member, nor was there a discussionof how to socialize White students to work and learn in a diverse workplace (Eitzen,1989).

Little attention has been paid to concrete experiences reported by students in doctoralprograms in sociology. Researchers have not critically analyzed the actual practices ofaffirmative action or the concrete everyday experiences of graduate students and facultyof color in sociology departments, despite the fact that racialized experiences and practicesof doctoral programs are central events in the training of future sociologists. Numerousstudies have recommended the following practices for multicultural training: the require-ment of a race relations course; the integration of race throughout the curriculum andreading material; inclusion of scholarship by scholars of color in all fields; and thepractical experience of learning to work, study and do research with students and facultyof color (James and Farmer, 1993; Lopez, 1993; Spring, 1995; Thompson and Tyagi,1993). On the brink of the twenty-first century, graduate programs in sociology need toprepare the next generation to teach and do research in a multicultural America.4 Howwell is the discipline accomplishing these tasks?

This paper addresses the situation faced by women of color graduate students andfaculty of color in sociology departments in the U.S. and explores the organizationallimitations of integrating race and “sociology of race” into graduate training and thus thediscipline. We attempt to shed light on two intertwined and interconnected dimensions: 1)whether women of color graduate students perceive that the study of race is supported asa major concentration and area of study in Ph.D. programs in sociology; and 2) theirperceptions of the status of scholars, faculty and students of color in the discipline. Topose the question another way, do women of color graduate students in sociology perceivethat the persistent realities of racism in our society are reflected in U.S. AmericanSociology?

Drawing on data from both qualitative and quantitative studies, we report findings onthe treatment of race in sociology graduate departments in the United States. Thetreatment of race was analyzed along three dimensions: 1) as a subject matter in the

Integrating Sociology 3

discipline, 2) in terms of the gender and racial ethnic composition of faculty and studentsin doctoral programs in sociology departments, and 3) as race relations between andamong faculty and women of color graduate students. Although these dimensions of raceare interdependent, for analytical purposes each will be examined separately.

METHODS

In 1991, telephone interviews were conducted with 26 women of color graduate studentsin sociology. The 26 women were selected from a sample of 26 women graduate studentsof color who had completed a questionnaire in 1989.5 The original population wasconstructed from the ASA’s list of minority fellows and augmented with additional namesreceived in response to our inquiries to each of the graduate programs listed in the ASA’sGuide to Graduate Programs. One hundred and sixty-five questionnaires were mailed outin 1989. A return rate of 40% resulted in a sample of 66 women graduate students of color.One of the items on the questionnaire asked the respondents if they would be willing toparticipate further in the study by being interviewed. Although 53 (80%) of the respon-dents agreed to be interviewed, we were only able to locate 26 of these respondents in1991 (Table 1)

The sample, primarily shaped by the respondents’ willingness to be interviewed,consisted of 2 Native Americans, 11 African Americans, 5 Asian Americans, and 8Latinas.6 Three of the women identified themselves as international students. Thesewomen were enrolled in graduate programs across the United States: 10 women were ingraduate programs on the West Coast; 10 on the East Coast; 4 in the South; and 2 in theMidwest. The women ranged in age from 25 to 65 years of age; half of the women werebetween 25 and 35. We interviewed women in various stages of their graduate career: 3were engaged in course work; 7 were completing comprehensive exams; 14 were in thedissertation process; and 2 had recently graduated. The sample included graduate studentsin both private and public institutions; however, the majority were enrolled in publicinstitutions.7

The telephone interviews were open-ended and ranged from 45 to 90 min. Theseconversations explored components of the graduate experience including: formal andinformal social structures of graduate programs, financial support, mentoring, relation-ships with faculty and other graduate students, research, publishing, teaching opportuni-ties, and other experiences which influenced decisions, choices, and career plans. Theinterview schedule was semistructured to solicit the broadest range of issues women of

TABLE 1Characteristics of the Samples

Race-Ethnicity Questionnaire Interview

Asian American 29% 19%African American 35% 42%Native American 11% 8%Latina 20% 31%Other 5%

Percentages may not add up to 100% because of rounding.


color face in graduate sociology programs. General questions asked interviewees in-cluded: Describe the department and university you currently attend? Why did you selectthis program? How much guidance have you gotten in course work? Describe the kind offinancial support received in graduate school, including teaching and research assistant-ships; and describe the process for obtaining assistantship. Describe any mentoringrelationships you have had in graduate school. What recommendations do you have aboutyour program or about sociology to be more inclusive of women of color as students andscholars? What are your recommendations for improving race relations in the disciplineand sociology departments. Interviews were transcribed and then coded in generalcategories, for example: mentoring, financial assistance, networking, criteria for selectionof graduate programs, relationships with faculty and students, teaching and publishingopportunities, and issues they identified as barriers.

It is highly likely that the sample volunteering to be interviewed showed significantselection bias. They had very strong feelings about race. This cuts two ways. It may be thatthe women of color graduate students that we interviewed hold opinions different from thenorm for sociology graduate students of color. Conversely, it may be the case that becausethey are graduate students specifically interested in race and majoring in sociology theyhave given more thought to, and are able to articulate better, issues that are extremelywidespread. Survey research is well-suited to discovering dominant perspectives andaverage opinions; survey findings are typically generalizable, but lack specificity. Qual-itative research on the other hand is less generalizable; researchers seek articulatespokespersons for particular positions and the findings are specific to time and place. Wemake no claims that the experiences or viewpoints of the women who talked to us are“typical” of graduate students of color. We do assert that 26 women of color graduatestudents in sociology were given the space to discuss their experiences and viewpoints andthat we did our best to fairly represent their words.

To obtain a broader picture of the course offerings and the status of faculty membersof color in doctoral programs in sociology departments, we sent a separate questionnairein 1992 to all of the 126 Ph.D. programs in the United States that were listed in the 1990ASA’s Guide to Graduate Programs(ASA, 1990). Ninety-two departments responded(73%), reporting data on a total of 1,769 full-time faculty as well as a number of facultywith joint appointments. We asked departments to provide the following data: the numberof graduate courses their department offered in the area of race and ethnicity; the rank,gender, race, and ethnicity of faculty members; and the number of faculty membersteaching or doing research in the area of race. In addition, we asked: 1) Is race andethnicity an area of specialty in the program? 2) Does your department offer graduate levelcourses in the area of race and ethnicity? 3) If so, how often are the courses offered? Whenwas it last offered? And what is the course? 4) Is the study of race included in the requiredtheory courses in your department? And 5) Is there an ethnic studies program at youruniversity?

Integration of Race in the Graduate Curriculum

Although not all of the women of color graduate students that we interviewed weredeveloping race as their area of concentration, they all voiced a desire for increased courseofferings, curriculum integration, and guest speakers. They argued that the study of race


was lacking in their departments and described the training they received as traditional andnarrowly focused. The following descriptions were typical of course offerings:

They (the department) require you to take these courses in various specialties like the family,but they never had a course on race and ethnicity or culture, basic culture, or something likethat. I think that would be a really good addition, maybe not as a mandatory course, butcertainly as an option for graduate students to take, I think there is some interest (in thesociology of race) but there just hasn’t been any initiative by the department to sort of dealwith that issue.

—An Asian American student enrolled in large west coast university who had completedher coursework and was writing her dissertation (ABD).

The department needs to be more receptive of other areas of interest besides mainstreamsociology. We’re still pretty conservative and mainstream. The department does not pay muchattention to race and ethnicity and I was very frustrated in terms of their curriculum. In orderto take a course on race and ethnicity I had to go outside the department to study, and it wasalways a residual category, or a category that didn’t have any critical place.

—An ABD Pacific Islander completing her dissertation at a small eastern university.

Data collected from the 92 sociology departments suggests that race and ethnicity wasnot well-integrated into the curriculum and was not always a major area in many Ph.D.graduate programs in the U.S. Less than a quarter (23%) of the responding departmentsincluded the study of race among required theory courses. Twenty-six departments did notoffer a single graduate course on race, even though six of these departments stated thatthey had a specialty in the area. Fourteen other departments offered a specialty in the areabut only listed one graduate course on race and ethnicity. Only 10 of the 45 departmentsthat identified race/ethnicity as a specialty offered three or more graduate courses. Overall,the 92 Ph.D. programs listed a total of 139 graduate courses on race, of which 26 wereseminars.

Departmental bulletins listing special programs and specialties are an important sourceof information for students shopping for graduate programs in sociology. The 1990 ASAGuide to Graduate Programs listed nine programs in the U.S. with a special program and75 programs with a specialty in race/ethnic/minority relations. Many of the intervieweesrecounted efforts to obtain information about special programs and specialties in graduateprograms by reading brochures, examining course listings, and talking to departmentchairs. However, their descriptions of selecting graduate programs indicated that it wasnot always easy to get a clear assessment of the department. Many departments listed raceas an area offered in the program, but on arrival students frequently discovered that theclaim was not supported by faculty or graduate courses. One of the African Americanstudents beginning work on her comprehensive examination at a large New Englanduniversity summarized the situation: “The department looks a lot better on paper than itis in reality.” A Latina ABD student recalled reviewing course offerings listed in thedepartment’s description of her graduate program in an urban eastern city and making themistake in assuming that the courses on race relations listed in the catalog actually existed:

They have some courses listed in the catalog but they just don’t offer them. So when you lookat it you’re sort of deceived. You have to actually look at what they have been offering.


Whereas faculty members may defend departments, noting that it may take 3 to 5 yearsto change catalogs or restructure from the losses of prominent faculty, these graduatestudents’ comments capture the importance of published material, including the ASAGuide to Graduate Programs, in undergraduate decision making that goes into applying toa Ph.D. program in sociology.8

Graduate courses identified by departments as part of their major or specialty in racetend to be subsumed under international studies or broader structural concerns, such asdemography, stratification, and organizations. Sometimes race is still included as acomponent of social problems courses. The wide range of titles for courses in therace/ethnic specialty in graduate programs suggests the marginal location of race inmainstream sociology: Problems in Emerging Countries, World Historical Study ofStratification, Poverty, Women and Third World Development, Political Economy ofWomen, Seminar on Social Organization, Latin American Society, Selected Topics inSociology of East Asia, Japanese Society, Sociology of Evil, Sociology of Latin AmericanLegal Systems, Development and Underdevelopment, Social Thought in Latin America,Peasants, Seminar on Problems of Modernization in Latin America and Cuban Revolu-tion. Although more than 10% of all courses listed under a race/ethnic specialty dealt withinternational topics, courses focusing on international issues do not necessarily addressrace and ethnicity in the U.S. nor provide students with training in the sociology of racerelations. Eleven percent of the courses listed under the specialty had titles indicating otherfields of study such as social inequality, poverty, social stratification, and social organi-zation, rather than race as the central focus of analysis.

Although we agree that race needs to be discussed across the curriculum, the lack ofspecific courses on race and ethnicity in the U.S. does not prepare graduate students tomeet the teaching needs of higher education. In the fall of 1994, eight states and theDistrict of Columbia had 30% or more college students who were minority-groupmembers; and an additional nine states have between 20 and 29% minority-group students(Chronicle of Higher Education, 1996). Curriculum reform over the last two decades hasoccurred primarily in the establishment of cultural diversity requirements for the under-graduate degree and the transformation of curriculum within traditional disciplines.Undergraduate curricula changes and diversifying populations have produced studentbodies with a much more sophisticated analysis, and expecting a more profound integra-tion of race and ethnicity in graduate education. Such integration will increasingly benecessary to prepare future teachers and researchers (Hu-DeHart, 1993).

Women of color graduate students recognized faculty members’ lack of expertise in thearea of race and ethnicity and were sharply critical of what they perceived as theirdepartments’ resistance to improving course offerings or integrating course content. Forinstance, a Latina student completing her dissertation in a large university in the westquestioned the practice of bringing in speakers who represented theoretical perspectivesand areas similar to the department’s own faculty:

The colloquiums all tend to be pretty much mainstream sociology. Which is really funny—they spend all this money bringing in all these people and graduate students are generallypretty bored with the one’s they do bring in. The kind of stuff we want to hear are thecontroversial issues, people that are doing things on feminist theory, issues that pertain tominorities and so forth. But they tend to bring in the same kinds of speakers all the time. And


when they do bring in speakers of color or people who are doing feminist theory they havea bigger turn out. But yet it’s like it doesn’t matter, they still keep bringing in the mainstreampeople.

Not only were specialty classes rare, race and ethnicity was not integrated throughoutthe curriculum. The women who we interviewed reported that in most classes the worksof nonwhite scholars were ignored. The pattern of exclusion was summarized by thePacific Islander completing her dissertation in a small eastern university who observedsuccinctly: “I think intellectual life is supposed to be about being curious about things andI think that there’s systematic inattention to being curious about race.” Students reportedthat faculty tended not to assign books or articles written by African Americans, Chicanas/os, Native American, and other domestic sociologists of color. The absence of scholars ofcolor in the curriculum resulted in a graduate training in theories of ethnicity emphasizingclassic models of EuroAmerican assimilation rather than the theoretical perspectivespresented in recent research and writings by scholars of color, for example critical race,social reproduction/resistance, or racial identity formation theories. Missing perspectivesdraw attention to what we termed in an earlier article (Margolis and Romero, 1998, p.19)“deafening silences.” There are two closely related issues, one is the absence of entirebodies of literature—empirical studies and theoretical works—the other is the apparentinability of many sociology programs to look squarely at issues of race in the UnitedStates without conflating race with social problems, international studies, and so on.

In the following statement, the student—an ABD Latina enrolled in a private southernuniversity—alluded to a long-standing debate in the discipline between qualitative re-search, which tends to be descriptive, ideographic, and particularist, and quantitativeresearch, which tends to be analytical, nomothetic, and generalizing. However this is notthe central axis differentiating scholarship specifically focusing on race from the hugenumber of works in which race appears as simply one variable within a whole array. Thereare profound studies of race in the United States that are primarily quantitative, Bowenand Bok’s (1998) recent studyThe Shape of the River, for instance. There are equallyimportant qualitative studies like Elijah Anderson’s (1990)Streetwise. The graduatestudent’s most important observation concerns the overall lack of diverse theoreticalperspectives in her sociology training:

It’s very much numbers. No critical analysis. No critical thinking. No profound analysis ofmatters. It was basically this is variable A, variable B—make association among them andthat’s it. That’s not the kind of sociology I like. I went to school in (country of origin) and Iwent to a Catholic university there. And it was much more critical. And much more Europeanalso. We did study Merton and all the functionalist North American sociology; but we alsostudied a lot of other schools of thought. Here it was like we rarely saw something different.It was very conservative quite frankly. Very, very conservative.

Although 39% of the women identified the curriculum as a strength of the department,nearly a third (30%) identified the curriculum as the major weakness in the program. Thissuggests that when promising young graduates from strong undergraduate programs withmulticultural curricula go on to take graduate courses they frequently encounter amainstream sociology that they find narrowly construed. Only 10% of the women of color


graduate students surveyed identified their graduate departments as interdisciplinary orincluding courses in ethnic studies.

The lack of sociology offerings frequently forces graduate students to turn to otherdepartments; Interdisciplinary Studies, Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies and Internationalprograms play important roles in providing training in the area of race, but not necessarilyfrom a sociological perspective. Furthermore, most of their exposure to the empirical andtheoretical writings of scholars of color in the U.S. and in the Third World took place ingraduate programs other than sociology. Unfortunately, graduate training outside thesociology department was not always an option. Many ethnic studies programs do notoffer advanced degrees. Only one ethnic studies department in the U.S. offers a Ph.D. Inour survey we found that 7 of the 20 universities with an all EuroAmerican sociologyfaculty did not have an ethnic studies program.

The Race and Ethnic Composition of Sociology Departments

The absence of scholars of color was not only apparent in perspectives, curriculum andassigned readings, but also in the demographics of faculty. In our survey of Ph.D.programs, we found that the number of faculty members of color did not seem to berelated to whether the department identified race as a specialty. Of the 45 departments thatoffered race and ethnicity as a specialty, 9 had no faculty of color, and 6 departments hadonly one faculty member of color. In other words, one-third of all departments advertisingrace and ethnicity as a specialty had one or fewer faculty members of color. We are notof course arguing that EuroAmerican faculty should not teach race/ethnicity courses, butit seems disingenuous to recruit graduate students to study in the area of sociology of race(a major attraction for students of color) when the classes willonly be taught byEuroAmericans. We can hardly imagine a graduate program offering a specialty in genderwhere all the courses are taught by men.

Although there are more faculty of color today than 25 years ago, the situation is farfrom equitable.9 Of the 92 departments responding to the survey, 41% of the departmentsreported only one faculty member of color; 38% had two or three; and 24% had four ormore faculty members of color. There is a positive correlation between the number offaculty members of color and the size of the department (r 5 0.4232p , .001). All sixdepartments with 30 or more faculty had at least one faculty member of color. Of theremaining 86 departments with 30 or less faculty members, 26% had only one facultymember of color.

Being the only one of your race in a department setting is one of the peculiar burdensfaculty of color must bear.10 Twenty-nine percent of departments had only one AfricanAmerican faculty member; 29% had one Asian-American faculty member, and 17% hadonly one Mexican American. African Americans were more likely than any other facultymember of color to be in a department with another member of their ethnic group. Thirtydepartments had two or more African American faculty members. Six departments hadtwo or more Asian Americans. Eight departments had two or more Mexican Americans.Three departments had two or more Puerto Ricans. When more than one faculty of colorof the same ethnicity resided in a department, they were more likely to be both men thanwomen.11

Graduate student life is usually characterized by intense concentration on course work,


teaching, and independent research. Although sometimes entering as a cohort, as studentsmove through the program they tend to withdraw from campus life to focus on compre-hensive examinations, dissertations, and their own emerging careers. This “natural”process of alienation from fellow students and faculty, and the attendant feelings ofisolation and loneliness, can be exacerbated by race. Students of color may feel isolated,or actually be ostracized, from the moment they enter a graduate program. They quicklycome to recognize that they face the same employment situation as previous generationsof sociologists; that is, when they get a job they are likely to be the only or one of twofaculty members of color in the department. Thus, the racial composition of faculty inPh.D. departments contributes to a different kind of loneliness or isolation than thesituation previously characterized by sociologists as the “lone scholar” (Becker, 1982;Hood, 1985).

Whether research and writing is characterized as an activity that occurs alone, or withthe assistance and encouragement of cultivated support groups, the environment underwhich professional work takes place is rarely discussed in terms of the gendered/racializedcomposition of departments. Accounts from women students of color indicated that racialisolation from other persons of color was one experience their graduate programs didprepare them for. The following quotes are characteristic of responses to our inquiriesabout other students of color:

I’m like the first Black student I guess that they’ve had in the past eleven years now. They doget a lot of foreign students but not Americans. In fact as far as American minority studentsgo—as far as I can tell there are none other than me.

—An African American preparing for comprehensive exams at an eastern university.

I never see them (women of color) and I never talk to them. They’re just not around at all.I think they had such a horrible experience that they just stay off campus and come in onlywhen necessary.

—A Latina beginning course work in a Ph.D. program on the West Coast.

When rank is examined, differences between faculty of color and White faculty arerevealed beyond the token role of “being the only one.” In many professions one wouldexpect a large number of new entrants to a labor pool and a gradual thinning out as rankincreases. However, sociology is “top heavy” with Full Professors. In our sample, about45% of all faculty members were Full Professors, 33% were Associate Professors, andonly 20% were at the Assistant level. An additional 2.4% were Instructors. (Instructorswere dropped from the analysis because they were such a small percentage of thesample.12) The distribution of EuroAmericans through the ranks reflected the overalldiscipline structure, but faculty members of color were much more likely to be AssistantProfessors and much less likely to be Full Professors. Among African American academ-ics, for instance, 28% were Full Professors, 37% were Associates, and 36% wereAssistants.13 Similar patterns exist for other sociologists of color. Table 2 displayssociology faculty by rank and by race.

There are marked and significant differences in rank between faculty members of colorand EuroAmerican faculty: 49% of EuroAmerican faculty members were Full Professorscompared with only 27% of faculty members of color. Conversely, only 18% of Eu-roAmerican faculty were Assistant Professors, whereas 38% of faculty of color held the


rank of Assistant. (X2 5 59.60; df.5 2; p , .0001). Whether this persistent inequalityreflects the fact that sociologists of color have only begun to gain admission to the hallsof academia, or testifies to the continued existence of barriers to career advancement, thesignificant differences between faculty members of color and EuroAmerican facultysuggests ongoing problems in the training, hiring and promotional policies within thediscipline. In these days of the waning of affirmative action, increasing tuition, anddeclining student aid packages, the dearth of faculty of color may be exacerbated byshrinking pools of graduate students of color. It is beyond the scope of this paper tosuggest solutions to a complex issue that involves improving education for minoritystudents at every level, as well as improving recruitment and retention of minoritygraduate students. However, in an earlier article (Margolis and Romero, 1998) we drewattention to certain elements of the hidden curriculum in graduate school that hinder anddiscourage students of color or actually drive them out of the program: stigmatization,blaming the victim, cooling-out functions, stereotyping, absence, exclusion, and deafeningsilences. White faculty especially, but all faculty can examine their graduate programs tosee if these elements are present and if they influence retention and completion rates forstudents of color. Once made visible, issues like these that involve professionalization andsocialization to the discipline can frequently be addressed in a positive manner.

Ethnic and racial demographic composition is further complicated by the difference inrank between EuroAmerican faculty and faculty of color. The location of faculty of colorwithin the hierarchical structure of Ph.D. programs is a strong statement to graduatestudents about race relations in the department and the discipline. The following descrip-tion of a graduate department by a Black ABD student enrolled in a small easternuniversity captures the symbolic message reflected in the racial composition of the facultyand their rank:

The department has about between 40 and 45 graduate students and about ten to fifteenfaculty persons. It’s a very conservative department. . . . Only one tenured female faculty.One junior faculty who’s Black. One minority woman who is on leave and she’s a juniorfaculty. So the power structure of the department is very male, very white, very old, and veryconservative.

TABLE 2Sociology Faculty 1992—Rank by Race

Race/EthnicityFull

ProfessorAssociateProfessor

AssistantProfessor

TotalN

African American 29 (28%) 37 (37%) 37 (36%) 103Asian American 12 (29%) 14 (33%) 16 (38%) 42Mexican American 8 (21%) 15 (39%) 15 (39%) 38Native American 1 (20%) 2 (40%) 2 (40%) 5Puerto Rican 4 (33%) 3 (25%) 5 (42%) 12Others of Color 6 (27%) 7 (32%) 9 (41%) 22EuroAmerican 746 (49%) 499 (33%) 9 (41%) 22EuroAmerican 746 (49%) 499 (33%) 268 (18%) 1511Column Total 806 (47%) 575 (33%) 352 (20%) 1733Total Faculty of Color 60 (27%) 78 (35%) 84 (38%) 222

Percentages may not add up to 100% because of rounding.


Women graduate students of color reported rarely having the opportunity to workclosely with a faculty of color. Students were not surprised by the under representation offaculty of color in graduate departments, but they were disturbed at the marginalization ofthose few who had “made it.” Several women of color graduate students recalledaccepting the offer to attend a particular program because of the presence of one or twofaculty members of color. On arrival, they were dismayed to discover that these facultymembers lacked power, influence, or resources, and more specifically were not teachingrequired courses in the graduate program. Moreover, as junior faculty, they were fre-quently torn between their felt need to mentor graduate students of color, and the “publishor perish” demands of their own careers. Consequently, students felt that they wereconfronted with White males espousing narrow and traditional views of sociology.Women of color graduate students reported that EuroAmerican faculty dominated therequired graduate courses, the committees allocating teaching and research assistantships,and qualifying examination committees.

Race Relations in the Department

Descriptions of social interactions between students of color and faculty offer animportant window into the everyday practices and rituals that shape race relations ingraduate programs. Racial tensions have been heightened around efforts for and againstaffirmative action recruitment and hiring practices, diversity requirements, and curriculumtransformation projects.

Race Relations and the Curriculum

Components of race relations in sociology departments are inseparable from curriculaissues on race and the racial composition of the faculty and student body. Neglect of raceissues throughout the curriculum results in students of color questioning their depart-ments’ commitment to issues of diversity. The following quote by an ABD AfricanAmerican student enrolled in a Midwestern university symbolizes the interconnectivenessof these issues:

I think that there’s a real lack of living up to what we say we stand for. Like we’re concernedabout race and gender and social class. But the everyday operation of the program, what weteach, doesn’t reflect that. I think the classes that we teach should bring out the perspectiveof people of different races and social classes and you don’t find that. I think that in puttingtogether the course readings it should be incumbent on teachers to find that research outthere, no matter how sparse it might be, that brings in the minority perspective and brings inthe class perspective. I don’t see that done very much.

The women that we interviewed experienced many of their departmental interactions ashighly racialized, and consequently they perceived race relations in the department as acritical component of the quality of education provided in their graduate programs.

The absence of race and ethnicity in the curriculum conveyed negative messages tograduate students and affected social relationships in departments. The following com-ment by a Native American completing her graduate work symbolizes the message createdby the departments’ lack of attention to the area of race and ethnicity: “I mean it was likesaying that all the thinking in the world comes from Europe. People from other parts of


the world don’t have any ideas. Your experience as a person of color isn’t really reflectedin what you study and what you learn.”

Resistance to incorporating the writings of scholars of color into required readings forcourses and qualifying exams similarly created racial divisions. For instance, traditionalreadings on race and ethnicity were seen as presenting a “blaming the victim” perspective.A Puerto Rican student completing her coursework at a large urban university discussedher discomfort in one class where the EuroAmerican professor used a cultural deterministmodel to explain the plight of Puerto Ricans: “We’re not comfortable with that course. Wedon’t like to be insulted that way.” Another Latina completing her preliminary examina-tions at an eastern university recalled attempts she and other students made to inform aprofessor of the ethnocentric perspective embedded in the required methods text. Theysuggested alternative views of the material, but the professor rejected the critique andrefused to consider other perspectives. Another incident demonstrating the lack of com-mitment to the integration of race was relayed by a teaching assistant who suggested to theEuroAmerican female faculty member that materials on women of color be incorporatedinto her packet on “Women and Work.” In response to her suggestion the professor askedher to find the materials; however, even after the student did the additional work ofcollecting them, the professor never included the articles in the course readings. Thegraduate student concluded that the professor did not consider the writings by women ofcolor social scientists to be either important or scholarly.

It appeared to many of the interviewees that the study of race relations in the U.S. andresearch by scholars of color was devalued. Consequently, these students of color oftenfelt they took a risk in their career if they expressed an interest in the area. As one Latinacompleting her dissertation in the West noted “If you’re interested in communities orethnic studies then you’re going to be ghettoized and you’re going to be perceived in acertain way.” Several students felt that their experiences in graduate school were cloudedby their interest in race. Another Latina graduate student at a west coast universitydescribed the way that students of color on her campus felt about their interests in race andethnicity:

They (students of color) thought they were jeopardized and placed in a whole differentcategory because their work wasn’t understood. Whenever it had to do with race or ethnicitythen it wasn’t seen as valuable or as important.

Students interested in areas of race and ethnicity expressed dissatisfaction with theintellectual support they received. They worried about finding faculty members willing towork with them. They said they ran the risk of not being taken seriously. Studentsperceived that research in the area of race had negative repercussions, including reducedaccess to mentoring, teaching, and research assistantships. Previous research on graduatetraining supports these women’s concern about mentoring and success (Blackwell, 1983).There is no formal structure to socialize students into the profession (Crothers, 1991;Pavalko and Holley, 1974) and faculty are less likely to mentor students who do not sharesimilar background and interests (Egan, 1989; Kleinman, 1983; Plutzer, 1991; Roth,1955).

About a fourth of the students that we interviewed noted that it was common forEuroAmerican faculty to advise graduate students of colornot to do research in their own


communities because they might “lose their objectivity.” An African American complet-ing her dissertation at a northern university pointed out a telling contradiction in thatdepartments do not make similar criticisms of recent immigrant and international studentswho wish to conduct research in their country of origin:

They were telling me that it was subjective and I should learn and do more things and be moreobjective and cover a broader area, and write about other people in other groups rather thanjust African Americans. But I never once heard one of the foreign students who were studying(their own) country ever told anything like that. And they were doing the same thing as I wasdoing. So it was like okay for them to do it. And I really felt a little prejudice there.

An example of paying the price for pursuing work on race, specifically on one’s ownethnic group, was provided by a Native American woman graduate student enrolled at asmall Pacific Northwest campus who recalled one faculty member’s opening statement atthe oral component of her comprehensive examinations:

“You know I finally figured out what’s wrong with you. . . . ” And I was kind of stunned. AndI said “Oh, well what?” And he said, “You are too much like an Indian and not enough likea sociologist.” Well my jaw dropped and I was speechless. And he went on to say “And if youdon’t straighten up you know what’s going to happen? We’re not going to allow you to teachsociology. We’re going to put you down in Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies orsomething like that for the rest of your life.

Both of these quotes illustrate how students become racialized if they study issues of race,particularly when the population is the same as their own ethnicity. Rather than recog-nizing the student as a future sociologist, some faculty members seem to think the studentsare too identified with the research subjects. The students are faulted for not distancingthemselves from their research, acquiring a professional detachment, or conducting“value-free” sociology.

Affirmative Action and Diversity Issues

Another common theme emerging from the women’s interviews about graduate schoolwas the experience of being treated as an “affirmation action case.” Several students notedthat staff, faculty, and students actually referred to students of color as “affirmative actioncases” as illustrated by one of the Native American graduate students interviewed:

Coming in as a woman of color—there was always that stigma that you were an affirmativeaction student; that you got in because they LET you in, that you did not GET in. . . . This islike OUR Indian student. And it’s like even some of the secretaries and some of the otherpeople would refer to me as OUR Indian student.

Students were particularly offended by the implied inferiority that the label “affirmationaction case” carried. One student completing coursework at a university on the West coastsummarized the attitude as follows:

Somebody told me once, well if foreign students are the cream of the crop you know andthey’re getting the best students from these other countries; where the minority students here


in this country, they (EuroAmerican faculty and students) feel they’re getting the worst of thelot.

Even when students of color were not referred to as “affirmative action cases,” theyexperienced race as a determining factor in their relationships with faculty members. AnABD Asian American completing her dissertation at a West coast university describedrelationships with EuroAmerican faculty that never developed beyond stereotypes:

My main frustration with her (mentor) is that she just really doesn’t know who I am. I meanfor someone who like works with her for so many years it’s like she has no idea who I am.Personally she makes a lot of assumptions about me that I find insulting, like maybe I’mdestined to teach at a community college instead of a university. She always is the one thattakes on a woman of color as an advisee and it doesn’t matter what your interests are. Ourjoke is that basically we’re her colonized people because I mean it’s like she doesn’t reallyknow who we are. But she has us and it’s sort of like little badges on her shoulders that sheworks with students of color.

Many faculty members apparently feel, as one student put it, that it is their “civic duty”to support minority graduate students. Others adopt students of color as “trophy students”because it helps their “liberal” image with students and faculty. The women of color thatwe interviewed felt they were less likely to be mentored by a faculty member as a resultof their shared research interest and more likely because of the faculty’s liberal self-perception.

Speaking Out

Changes in departmental procedure to increase the pool of graduate students and facultyof color, as well as to increase the number of course offerings in the area of race, weretypical of student demands. Women who we interviewed described efforts to enhance theirgraduate training in the area of race; they volunteered to serve on search committees, torevise curricula, and to bring scholars of color as speakers to campus.14 However,political involvement and lobbying in their department was extra work that took studentsaway from their studies, and sometimes political activism produced a backlash fromEuroAmerican faculty and graduate students. The ABD Pacific Islander enrolled in asmall eastern university described the costs of the additional burden:

I often felt very tired and very alienated and very resentful that: “Here we go again, I haveto be the one to say something.” I didn’t feel like I got a lot of support from immediate peers.I think they saw it as, “Well, this is her way of sort of getting attention,” and, you know, Ifelt that rather than getting any benefit psychologically or otherwise from speaking up, peoplebecame very careful around me. And again, I felt like this is not right – the point is not foryou to be careful around me. . . because here come the minorities, you know, the point is toreally change.

Although they were expected to and to some degree felt forced to speak out, when theydid so students were sometimes marked as troublemakers or someone with a “chip on theirshoulder.” This double bind sometimes makes it difficult to find support in the depart-ment. Faculty may feel guilty or uncomfortable interacting with these students and avoid


them in class even limiting their responses and comments on papers. An ABD AfricanAmerican enrolled in a private eastern university described the personal cost in becomingpolitically active on issues of affirmative action and diversifying the curriculum:

First of all, I was sticking my neck out and telling people things they didn’t want to hear. Imean, I think the whole topic of race is very, very touchy. And I was later told a couple weeksafter I’d given the talk, in a one-to-one conversation with a white male that basically all thewhite males are afraid to say anything. . . I felt frustrated even after the fact, because I feltlike, you know, I’m glad you’re coming and telling me this but that’s no solution either foryou all just to decide to, “we’re going to pout and sulk and we’re not going to say anything.”

There are possible dangers even in speaking out in academic forums governed bypresumptions of openness and academic freedom. For example, a few years ago one of thestudents we interviewed spoke out during a SWS session on the experiences of women ofcolor graduate students. Her advisor was present during the session and punished thestudent for her participation by not working with her for 6 months afterwards. The advisorsaid that she felt attacked and that she resented the student discussing the department ina negative light.

Interpreting Differences

In summary, the students we talked to characterized faculty as resistant to the discussionof race relations in the department, noting that sociology faculty frequently ignore or seemto be uncomfortable discussing race relations when the issues are close to home. An ABDAsian American woman observed, “There’s still this sense that you’re sort of being rudeif you bring up race, issues of race. You know, you shouldn’t be talking about thesethings.” She also found this attitude among graduate students:

Even among graduate students, it was rude to bring up the topic of racial discrimination orwhat to do about race or what to do about the high attrition rate. I mean, it was just—it wasreally (considered) irrelevant.

In the students’ perception, EuroAmerican faculty conveyed a high level of discomfortin their interaction with students of color and displayed signs of fear and intimidation (lackof eye contact, wringing hands). As an ABD Latina enrolled on a large urban West Coastcampus explained:

This guy is an Anglo male and he cannot even relate to me. He’s a very nice person. He hastried. He cannot even talk to me and not feel uncomfortable. Every time we sit and talk he’sall jumpy. He can’t deal with me being different. And the only explanation I can get, youknow—I’m not White. That’s the only reason why—because I don’t see any other. We havethe same interests. I like all the things he likes, I read, I know what his field is. But, when Iapproach him or anything he’s so uncomfortable that it makes me feel uncomfortable. . . . Isee my friends who are Anglo, they get along (with him). . . . I know he is not racist. I knowthat it’s not that. He cannot deal with me. Culturally I don’t know what he thinks I come fromor, I don’t know, it’s weird. So I think that it helps in graduate school to be White.

The student’s analysis reveals a sophisticated distinction between “racism,” which


carries meanings of enmity, power, and discrimination and the kind of ethnocentricawkwardness exhibited by the professor in question. In most cases, we are not discussingindividual racist attitudes. On the other hand, the lack of integration of race in the graduatecurriculum, alongside the absence of faculty and students of color, fostered a perceivedpaternalistic and hostile environment and contributed to an atmosphere of suspicion anddistrust felt by everyone. More importantly these structural inequalities, which may wellbe considered institutional racism, convey perceived meanings that poison the well bydirectly affecting the education process. For example, several students felt that facultylimited their comments on papers to the student’s writing and never addressed the contentof their work:

In general they’re either correcting their (graduate students of color) spelling errors, “Yourmargins aren’t wide enough” or they’re not understanding what you are writing about.

—ABD African American student enrolled in a Midwest university

Given the level of racial tension, some EuroAmerican faculty may indeed fear givingstudents of color critical feedback on their work because they do not want to be accusedof being insensitive or racist, but the result has created an atmosphere of differentialgrading and has supported criticisms of discrimination.15

Another woman graduate student of color completing her dissertation at a university inthe Pacific Northwest recalled taking a statistics course along with a good friend who wasFrench. Even though they did their assignments together, she consistently received a lowergrade.

Francoise was seen as the European and the very bright student and I was seen as theMexican and the very dumb student. And that was the issue that other students of color hadin a cohort previous to mine. They had friends who were White and we would all be workingon things. They would turn papers in—except for the Asian students, and see there’s thatstereotype of the model minority, which (Asian American student in the program) absolutelyhated, but she (Asian American student) could do no wrong.

It may well be that the French woman was a better student, but without integratedcurricula or faculties, everyday practices and rituals between faculty and students wereinterpreted through racialized lenses.

Also emerging from the accounts of the women were problems created by the failureto distinguish between U.S. minority racial/ethnic groups and international students whomay share certain phenotypical, racial, or ethnic qualities but have had extremely differenthistorical experiences and often come from different (e.g., higher) class backgrounds. Thisis exacerbated by conflicts of interest and struggles over scarce resources between groupsdefined in terms of diversification and internationalization. Diversification, meaninginclusion of historically discriminated against American minority groups, and internation-alization meaning the inclusion of foreign students, are not the same even though both arelaudable goals. But frequently, departments have conflated these two missions: first, bycounting them all in their diversity statistics; and second, by drawing from the same poolof resources, creating competition for scarce resources and divisiveness among studentsand faculty.


DISCUSSION

A central aspect of the experience of the women that we interviewed was the feeling thatthey did not fit into programs that had been designed for an “ideal type,” perceived asEuroAmerican, male, heterosexual, and from a middle-class background. A 29-year-oldAfrican American completing her first year of graduate school at a small New Englanduniversity acknowledged that she did not have the same undergraduate training as otherfirst-year graduate students, voiced her frustration with trying to seek the extra assistanceshe needed with her advisor: “She just doesn’t know how to deal with people that don’tcome in already perfect.” Her experience is consistent with Mayrl and Mauksch’s (1987)finding that graduate programs in sociology “are created and maintained without anyconcern about the characteristics of their students” (p. 16–17).

A related but larger theme emerges from the interviews: that integration is a two-waystreet. The women who spoke with us believed strongly that their gender, ethnic andcultural experience should be incorporated as part of the intellectual and social culture ofthe department. They felt that they had much to contribute to the discipline, and resentedimplicit assumptions that along with learning sociology they were there to be socializedinto the dominant “White male” image of a sociologist. Their accounts reveal an appre-ciation of difference and an expectation that integration means more than the presence ofpeople of various skin tones:

It’s true. I have different ideas. I have a different language. I was involved in political thingsand they were not. You know I mean we are totally different. I am a woman. I have an accent.It’s totally different.

–ABD Latina enrolled at a large southern university

I don’t think faculty think about the differences in our experiences and what that means interms of our academic—what makes a viable graduate experience for us. I don’t think a lotof thought has been given to how to make it (the program) a more open community. How arewe going to make this work for everybody? And on some level of course there’s no interestin making it work for everybody because we don’t want everybody.

—African American student taking comprehensive exams at a northern university.

An ABD African American student enrolled at a small eastern university recalled aconversation that she and another woman of color had with the department chair:

In the same discussion of racial equality within the department he kind of listened to us goon and then he rolled back in his chair and he said, “You really can’t expect the faculty tochange you know. We’re all kind of old and we’re set in our ways and we’re not goingto—you just can’t expect us to change and start. . . having the classroom be an equalclassroom.”

But many studentsdo expect the faculty and the discipline to change. We found thatstudents’ definitions of the situation incorporated more than simply hiring faculty of color.They expected race and ethnicity to be treated as serious and legitimate areas of graduatestudy. They expected specific courses on race and they expected all other courses to beintegrated, including theory and methods.

However, faculty and administrators do not necessarily share the same definitions of


diversity held by these women of color graduate students. Many departments implementedaffirmation action as a process for reviewing candidates and recruiting graduate students;however, they may not perceive curriculum issues as related. Sociology departmentsfrequently separate issues that students view as interrelated and inseparable: Recruitmentis governed by affirmative action legislation (or the lack thereof) and rules and standardsset by faculties and admission committees; faculty hiring and promotion while subject toreview under civil rights law, is determined by internal standards for promotion andtenure; course material decisions have to do with academic freedom and are typically theprovenance of individual faculty members; and, curriculum decisions are made bydepartmental committees according to democratic and collegial practices.

The treatment of these issues as mutually exclusive reinforces the understanding of raceand ethnicity in terms of skin color and not life experiences, research interests, paradigmsor culture. It suggests that graduate students and faculty members of color should becomemainstream sociologists in “whiteface,” adopting the attitudes and values of past gener-ations of EuroAmerican male sociologists. It also suggests that the inclusion of scholarsof color will not materially change the discipline itself. However, if our sociologicalimaginations allow us to perceive that “race/ethnicity” is a different life experiencecreated through structural processes, then we would expect department diversity to bereflected across the curriculum and in all areas. Given the different definitions of thesituation, it is not surprising that a Latina beginning course work in a Ph.D. program at auniversity on the West coast concluded: “I think that the argument could be made that thedepartment is not committed to minorities or to diversity.” This exploration of theexperiences of women of color graduate students in sociology highlights tensions betweenthe practice of affirmative action in sociology departments, race relations between Whitesand minority faculty and graduate students, and the study of sociology of race.

Ph.D. programs in sociology do not appear to have yet been influenced by transfor-mation projects that have been diversifying the curriculum and increasing multiculturalrequirements in undergraduate education. Rather than responding to demographic andeducational changes, the discipline appears to be training the next generation of sociol-ogists without regard to the job market or student population. Less than one-quarter ofdepartments offer a meaningful opportunity to study race/ethnicity in the context of theUnited States. We conclude from the paucity of courses and specialties offered thatsociology departments are not prepared for the diverse student body of the twenty-firstcentury. The problem has three outcomes: first, given the transformation of the UnitedStates into a multicultural nation, and the significant issues and tensions raised by thisongoing pattern of social change, this lacunae points to a significant failing on the part ofthe discipline in terms of areas of investigation; second, the lack affects graduate studentsof color and EuroAmerican students who are being ill-prepared for the conditions underwhich they will live and work together; and third, this failure of emphasis by sociologymay mean that bright students interested in these issues choose to go elsewhere, directlyaffecting the discipline’s ability to reproduce itself.

We began by asking if the persistent realities of racism in our society are reflected inU.S. American Sociology? Our conclusion is in the affirmative. Sociologists frequentlycriticize intransigent, fossilized, and ossified social structures in the “real” world, evenwhile maintaining them in the “small” world of academia. We analyze social change writlarge, and resist it in our discipline, our departments, our schools. In this paper, we


marshaled comments by a sample of women of color graduate students on a number ofcritical issues: curricula that are out of date, ignore race, are monocultural, and look betterin the catalog than in the classroom; faculty that are top heavy with older white males;students discouraged from pursuing what attracted them to the academy in the first place;students in conflicts with racial overtones over scarce resources and favors. These issuesare not peculiar problems facing students of color, nor can they be overcome by studentsof color. The comments by the students draw attention to contradictions in the disciplinethat the discipline ignores at its peril. Although not new recommendations (but clearly notuniformly implemented), students interviewed identified the need to integrate race, class,and gender into existing courses; require courses on race and ethnicity alongside theoryand methods; place race as a top priority in scheduling speakers and visiting faculty;support research interests on race (without ghettoizing such work into ethnic studies); andhire more tenured and tenure-track faculty of color.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1903) declared in 1903: “The problem of the Twentieth Century isthe problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asiaand Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (p. 10). In midcentury, the KernerCommission drew our attention to the existence of “two nations, separate and unequal.”We end the century still struggling to understand and break down racial/ethnic divisionswithin society and the discipline that studies society. In the next century America will bea much more complex and diverse nation home to Latinos, Asian Americans, groups fromthe Indian subcontinent, African Americans, and others from the African Diaspora, NativeAmericans, European immigrants, EuroAmericans, and people of mixed ancestry. Evenamid the old prejudices, our differences and similarities have less to do with skin colorthan with social class and culture. These are precisely the subject matter of sociology. Wehave much work to do.

NOTES

1. Despite the discipline’s commitment to affirmative action and diversity there is still amarked absence of faculty of color in Ph.D. programs. Although 22% of the American populationis African American, Latino, Asian American or Native American, our study found that 87% of allthe faculty members teaching in Ph.D. programs were EuroAmerican. Six percent were AfricanAmerican; 2% were Asian American; 2% were Mexican American; less than 1% were NativeAmerican; less than 1% were Puerto Rican, and slightly more than 1% listed themselves as “other.”These figures are quite congruent with national data collected by the Chronicle of Higher Education(1995). They reported that in fall 1995, 85.9% of all Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors wereWhite (p. 30).

2. The symbolic importance of these elements of the graduate school experience is a centralelement of the accounts given by the women of color graduate students in sociology who weinterviewed and report on in this study (See also, Margolis and Romero, 1998). The following studydoes not attempt to provide a critical assessment of the how race has been part of the sociologicallegacy (interested readers may wish to consult James B. McKee’s (1993)Sociology and the RaceProblem: The Failure of a Perspective).

3. Special issues were published byThe American Sociologist(1988) andTeaching Sociology(1991).

4. Between 1976 and 1995 the percentage of white students in higher education declined from82.6% to 72.3% percent of the student body. During this period minority students (defined as:


Blacks, Asian/Pacific Islanders, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Hispanic, and nonresident aliensincreased from 15.4% to 24.5% of the student body. (SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education,National Center for Education Statistics, 1997, Digest of Education Statistics, 1997 (based on theIPEDS/HEGIS “Fall Enrollment” surveys)). This trend is likely to continue as higher percentagesof minority youth go to college and as people of color become a larger overall proportion of theAmerican population. The Bureau of the census projects that Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islanderpopulations will increase from 14% of the population in 1996 to 24% of the population by 2025.(SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration Bureau of theCensus, 1996, Census Brief “Warmer, older, more diverse: State-by-state population changes to2025” December 1996.

5. The fact that only women of color graduate students were interviewed (and not males andfemales) is an artifact of the origin of the study. Our research on these questions began while thesenior author was serving on the Social Issues Committee of Sociologists for Women in Society(SWS) in 1988. The organization expressed concern that professional organizations were notsuccessful in reaching women of color sociologists. She agreed to conduct a study on the status ofwomen of color in the discipline and to gather data on their experiences as graduate students. Theinitial aim was to identify problems and barriers, and make recommendations to sociology depart-ments, faculty and professional associations. A preliminary report was presented at the 1990 SWSannual meetings. Since then a number of papers have been drawn from the material (Romero andStorrs, 1994; Romero, 2000; Margolis and Romero, 1998).

6. The sample is fairly consistent with the national data on women of color receiving doctoratedegrees across disciplines in 1991–92. Of the 1550 women of color, 53 were Native American, 497were Asian American, 647 were Black, and 353 were Hispanic (Chronicle of Higher Education,1995, p. 40).

7. Because there are so few women of color graduate students in sociology, to ensureanonymity, a further break-down of sample characteristics is not possible. All names and placeshave been changed or deleted.

8. The advent of the World Wide Web is leading to the creation of departmental pages wherestudents can view actual course offerings and even read sample syllabi. Technology might go a longway toward remedying the issues of false advertising and misrepresentation raised by the students.It will also make students more informed consumers and intensify competition between depart-ments.

9. Despite the ASA, SWS, and other sociological associations’ commitment to affirmativeaction and diversity there is still a marked absence of faculty of color in Ph.D. programs. Ifsociology graduate faculty are to represent the composition of the U.S. population, then sociologistsof color would be 22% of the faculty rather than the current 13%.

10. For further discussion of the experience of “tokens” and “role models,” see Linda S.Greene’s (1990–1) article on an African American female law professor and Mary Romero’s (1997)article on Mexican American female faculty.

11. Although in this paper we focus centrally on issues of race, we are well aware that genderis an equally important factor in the diversity and integration of academic departments. Some mightargue that there is an interaction effect, we prefer the analysis of James Geschwender (1992), whocoined the term “ethgender” to emphasize that identityalways includes race/ethnicity and gender(among other traits). Thus, a faculty member is always perceived as a White man or a AfricanAmerican woman. This essential connection is emphasized in Spanish and other gendered languageswhere the terms Latino and Latina already convey the inseparability of gender and ethnicity.

12. Comparable figures for full time faculty in the ranks of Full, Associate, Assistant, andInstructor are as follows: Full Professors are 33.1%, Associate Professors are 26.0%, AssistantProfessors are 26.9%, and Instructors are 13.8% (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1995). Thussociology, appears particularly top heavy.


13. Whereas the situation in sociology is demonstrably better for African Americans than inother disciplines, the pattern between the ranks looks similar across the university. Of all BlackAssistant, Associate, or Full Professors, 25.8% are Full, 30.5% are Associate, and 43.5% areAssistant (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1995, p. 30).

14. T.R. Young (1974) identified similar strategies of resistance.15. We wish to thank an anonymous reviewer who pointed out that a important problem is

raised here, but no solution offered. It may well be that this is simply an intractable issue givencurrent levels of suspicion and competition in academia. The entire edifice of schooling in theUnited States, grounded in property taxes and what Jonathan Kozol (1991) termed “savageinequalities,” governed by standardized tests applied to students who do not receive standardizededucations, and the issues of cultural capital and resistance raised by scholars like John Ogbu (1994)and Donaldo Macedo (1994) conspire to make grading across racial and ethnic divides a painfullypolitical process.

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