AAU Membership at What Cost?

When a university's quest for inclusion in organizations like the American Association of Universities comes at the expense of the recruitment and retention of minority faculty, some question the institution's diversity commitment.
By Bill Robinson

These are heady times at the University of South Carolina (USC), the Palmetto State's largest institution of higher education.
The university's administration recently kicked off the public phase of a $300 million capital campaign that it hopes to reach by the school's bicentennial in 2001. Some $200 million in pledges, including a whopping $25 million from New York financier Darla Moore, has breathed excitement into a public university looking to escape from the shadow of its better-known counterparts in the deep South.
Research grants brought in by USC professors have doubled in the past four years — to $92 million — and the undergraduate library is moving up the rankings list of institutions with the best and broadest holdings.
Additionally, the institution is making a concerted bid to become a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU). The AAU is a group of 62 universities that emphasize such academic yardsticks as federally funded research, scholarly publications, the quality of an institution's library, and high academic standards. 
But all is not well here in the state's capital. USC is struggling to attract and hold on to African American faculty in a state where 30 percent of the population is Black. And part of the problem has to do with the university's quest to become an AAU member.
Shortly after the fall semester started, Dr. Aretha Pigford, one of the university's most visible Black professors, resigned from the College of Education. Her decision to leave follows the departure of other African American professors, including three in the College of Social Work.
"I've reached [the] point [where] being in an institution where there is an alignment of what's important to me and what's important to the institution is more important than I realized. I decided to make a change," she says.
However, Russ McKinney, a USC administration spokesman, says the university is committed to attracting and retaining minority faculty members.
"It's very difficult out there — for everybody," McKinney says of competition to find African American professors.
USC, which has a Carnegie classification of Research II, does have a laudable track record in one area of diversity. In the 1990s, it has emerged as one of the nation's leaders in graduating African American students. The number of Black students who pursue degrees at USC is greater than any school in South Carolina — including the historically Black land-grant school, South Carolina State University, in Orangeburg. Approximately 19 percent of USC's 16,000 undergraduates are African American.
Nonetheless, it is still possible for students to spend an entire undergraduate career at USC and never see a Black professor in a classroom. Of the 1,421 faculty members at USC this year, 153 — or 3.8 percent — are African American. And the numbers at Clemson University, South Carolina's second largest public research institution, are even lower.  There, barely 3 percent of the full-time
faculty members are Black. In 1995, Blacks comprised 3.2 percent of all faculty at Research I and II institutions.