Recently, when Georgetown Professor Maurice Jackson went to the University bookstore to purchase a book he had written to give to a friend, he received an unpleasant surprise: the store did not stock his text, African-Americans and the Haitian Revolution. It led him to examine the Faculty Authors section, which he found did not contain many books by black Georgetown professors.
“As I looked through the faculty things, I didn’t see any books there [by] African-American faculty,” he said. “Or if there were, I didn’t see them prominently displayed.”
Behind the scarcity of books written by African-Americans at Georgetown is a dearth of black faculty members, a problem acknowledged earlier last May by the Main Campus Diversity and Inclusiveness Initiative’s Academic Working Group. President John DeGioia created the group in April 2009 to address a lack of diversity and understanding of diversity issues perceived by many faculty and students.
But since the initiative’s launch, Jackson claims it has been slow to have a significant effect on the makeup of Georgetown’s faculty.
Provost James O’Donnell, the co-chair of the initiative, explained that because the initiative has moved beyond last year’s series of town hall and working group meetings, its progress is less noticeable.
“What we did last year eagerly, we are now doing systematically,” he said.
According to O’Donnell, the initiative has already begun to affect the student body. In a Sept. 21 e-mail to students, President John DeGioia and O’Donnell said that funds provided by the Office of the Provost allowed more students to attend this year’s Hoya Saxa weekend, which “perhaps [contributed] to the significant increases in African-American students who accepted our offer of admission into the class of 2014.”
O’Donnell added that there have been changes in the way faculty are hired.
“Every search is a diversity search,” he said, adding that diversity should be reflected in “the aggregate of [University] choices.”
Some of the problems identified by the initiative remain unresolved. The search continues for an African-American History professor. It also remains unclear how the proposed diversity core curriculum requirements will be implemented.
In October, Associate Provost Marjorie Blumenthal revealed that any potential diversity requirements will not be implemented until the University is reaccredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. When implemented, O’Donnell said any requirements would likely follow a “matrix” pattern, meaning they will be satisfied by a course which also fulfills another requirement.
“Given the nature of the requirements we have, if we’re not addressing diversity in a lot of those courses already, we’re doing something wrong,” O’Donnell said.
Jackson remains optimistic that Georgetown would successfully address the diversity deficit he perceives at Georgetown.
“That would be the bigger question which I think—which I hope—Georgetown is trying to address, although a bit slowly,” he said.
