Recruiting black faculty: 'A great challenge, a great opportunity'

And from the bully podium, he spent 10 years teaching and pressing Duke toward more integration.

"It was a big step in the South...," said Cook, the first black professor at any predominantly white university in the South. "It was a great challenge for me, and a great opportunity."

Despite Cook's success, there was one nagging problem.

"Duke was very slow in getting additional black faculty, that was the one disappointing thing," he said. "I brought it up to my department, and I was told, 'We have our black,' more or less."

Today, more than 30 years after Duke stood as a courageous pioneer for integration, professors and administrators continue to grapple with the challenge of quickly diversifying the faculty without resorting to tokenism.

"On black faculty recruitment, we've made a good deal of progress-including some stellar recent appointments-and still have a lot of distance to cover," said President Nan Keohane.

Keohane and her two predecessors have all expressed a strong personal and ideological commitment to diversity-both of the student body and the faculty.

As a manifestation of this commitment, the University adopted the 1988 Black Faculty Initiative that required

But ask administrators about increasing the number of black faculty, and they will automatically rattle off a list of obstacles: there simply aren't enough black scholars in some fields, causing fierce competition among universities; even if hired, promising black scholars become targets for other schools; the South is not an inviting place; Durham can't compete with the Northeastern metropolises.

But Baker considers these reasons to be "alibis," contrived stereotypes about where professors want to live or work that give administrators across the nation an easy explanation for their poor recruitment and retention record.

"My sense is that a place like Duke University has as much a powerful attraction as it does a reputation of historical exclusion," he said. "[If enough is done], there should be no possibility of a professor leaving. Such institutions as Duke shouldn't be vulnerable to raiding."

Baker thinks that if the University thought more creatively about attracting and keeping the best scholars and abandoned the assumption of their scarcity, administrators would be able to meet the problems head on.

Provost Peter Lange believes in the small-pool theory. "A minority faculty member at our school very often becomes a target for another school," he said, adding that Duke must recruit both junior and senior faculty members. "There are real pressures on retaining professors from that relatively smaller pool on which there is a lot of attention."

Certainly, 30 years of grappling with this problem have taught administrators the importance of campus climate in both recruitment and retention.

"I always try to assess rigorously the racial climate of an environment before deciding to go there. In fact, no salary offer or high prestige can outweigh this issue in my mind," said Arlie Petters, the William and Sue Gross associate professor of mathematics, who came to Duke last year as a highly touted recruit. "I need to be in an environment where I can flourish intellectually and not get psychologically worn down by a racial climate that chips away at me bit by bit."

As far as Duke's racial climate goes, the signals are conflicting, with magazine rankings in the past few years that have both praised and criticized the University.

"Some black professors do leave because they feel a disproportionate amount of isolation and believe the condition as a sign that they are not wanted in the department...," said Leonard Beckum, who served as Duke's highest-ranking black administrator in the early 1990s. "Others leave because they get better offers."

Still, many black professors say Duke has a national reputation for its commitment to diversity and integration.

Cook said Duke's reputation stems from the historical role it played in integrating Southern universities. "It has the reputation in the black community of having a tradition of decency," he said.

Karla Holloway, dean of humanities and social sciences and one of the University's most prominent black scholars, said that having black scholars who have worked and thrived at Duke is the school's "best advertisement" on the national scene.

"Duke is known as a private university that has chosen to affirm, in the most serious way, our commitment to affirmative action," she said.

Lange agreed, noting however, that Duke is "hiring people who are excellent scholars, not just to be minority magnets."

But the value of a diverse faculty transcends the quality or quantity of a professor's scholarship, Beckum explained. "While all professors have their own ideas and belief systems, minority belief systems and experiences are many times different and can contribute to understanding implications of certain theories and concepts," he said.

And Duke has clearly made a financial and structural commitment to diversity through the establishment of the Office of Institutional Equity and the extension of tenure lines to African and African-American Studies.

The ramifications of the latter decision reach far beyond the hiring of a few professors within AAAS, said Holloway, who spearheaded the fight for tenure as director of the program. For minority faculty considering jobs at the University, "You're much more likely to look positively at Duke," she explained. "It shows that you are valued in terms of your culture as well as in terms of intellect."

But valuing people for their culture can place institutions and individuals in dangerous, tokenist territory, as Cook's experience showed.

Once Cook broke the color barrier, other Southern schools began to follow suit. He remembers one letter in particular from the president of a major Midwestern institution to the chair of the political science department. "'I understand that you have a Negro'-we were Negroes then-'I understand that you have a Negro on faculty there. Where did you find him? We want one too.'"

In the last 30 years, so much and yet so little has changed.

Still, many Duke scholars think the University is in a position to once again become the model for courageous leadership. "Duke has done a good job in the past," Baker said. "I think it's poised now to do a better job than perhaps any other school in the country."