The activist group Concerned Student 1950 has vowed to keep pushing for change in the wake of resignations by both the University of Missouri system President, Tim Wolfe, and chancellor of the Columbia campus, R. Bowen Loftin.
Among their demands is increasing the number of black faculty members at Mizzou from 3 percent to 10 percent over the next two years. Enrollment at the Columbia campus is 34,972, of which 2,542 (7 percent) are African American. Several protesters say that roughly 16 percent of the state's population is African American, and they want the school to better reflect the state's population. At the same time, an analysis of federal data shows the underrepresentation of black faculty is hardly unique to MU.
Here are some big picture numbers from the 2013 school year that were collected by the U.S. Dept. of Education.
- There are more than 700 four year and above public colleges and universities receiving federal money.
- Only 66 of those schools had 10 percent or more black faculty members.
- More than half of those 66 schools were Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) which have far higher percentages of black faculty members.
- Once HBCU's are taken out of the mix, it leaves only 27 American colleges and universities that can say at least one in 10 faculty members are black. That's roughly 4 percent of all schools.
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