“I didn’t see a place for me there.” Brittany King started as a journalism major at the University of Missouri, but graduated in the fall of 2015 with a Mass Communications degree.

While she still works in journalism freelancing full-time, she felt that the journalism school there didn’t put the spotlight on the diversity issues they should — a severe criticism, considering in fall of 2015 the University of Missouri made national headlines with student protests of the administration’s apathetic reaction to hate crimes.

She knew going to Mizzou, some several hours away from her hometown of Indianapolis, was going to be tough. Being the only brown girl in class, however, was a totally different kind of tough. “I thought I was ready,” King said, “I didn’t think it was going to… affect me, and my mental health, in such unexpected ways.”

Everyone feels alone and isolated when they go to college, King said. “But when no one else looks like you?” It’s another level of loneliness.

Recruit

Representation among j-school faculty is as poor as it is among newsrooms, which are 22.6 percent non-white, according to the American Society of News Editors. This is up roughly six percent from last year, a huge jump, and up nine percent since 2008. For j-schools, full-time faculty averages a little more than ten percent, according to data I used from the ACEJMC.

Why aren’t journalists of color teaching?

Patty Loew is a Native American journalism professor who was actively recruited to work at Northwestern University, and attributes her employment there to the “aggressive” campaign to hire her.

“People might say, oh, ‘we are open to people of color, and embrace diversity, and here’s our position vacancy listing,’ — which may not even be on the right website for recruiting faculty of color,” Loew disapproves of such passive efforts. “That’s not a diversity initiative… You have to actively commit to diversifying yourself, go to where the journalists of color are, make those connections, and hire there.”

For instance, the Klein College of Media & Communication at Temple University seeks out talented journalists of color and monitors their careers. The university advertises not only on NABJ and NAHJ websites, but also within academic publications focused on minority issues. Dean David Boardman said, “A lot of times the best people, and a particularly faculty of color, are in great demand, and they’re often not actively seeking jobs. So we actually pick up the telephone and make outreach to them saying, we know you’re probably not looking, but let us tell you about what we’re doing.” The college won the AEJMC Diversity & Equity Award in 2018.

Niketa Reed was hired on as an adjunct at the University of Arkansas after its non-compliance judgement on diversity standards by the ACEJMC. Working on diversity with the school was, and is, a challenge.

For instance, the school had been judged non-compliant in 2016 because of their lack of domestic diversity, yet more than a few faculty members thought this was unfair because they already had brown and black people on staff. Reed had to help educate them, without putting anyone on the defensive, that her experience as an African-American is different than that of her Ghanian-American colleague.

Reed calls it the “Cute Phase,” where everyone it ready to be diverse and inclusive and cheer-leading equity measures, but the real work has yet to be done. Black students in journalism classes, she said, feel “shot-down” because a few professors are skirting around the uncomfortable issues. When black students want to cover racially-charged incidents, professors usually tell them to tackle it differently, in a way that’s easier to “prove,” and doesn’t focus so much on the ambiguous and complicated realm of race.

Mike Day graduated from the University of Arkansas in 2015. He felt isolated at the predominately white institution after growing up in a largely black community. He met resistance from some professors when he wanted to cover activism efforts in Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown. “They didn’t see the story I saw,” Day said. They hesitated, because they didn’t see the same news value that he did.

“We have to educate the university officials,” Reed said, “Just because you believe in your heart that you’re diverse, that doesn’t mean you’re finished working. So our role is to be authentic, and realistic, and say that it’s okay to say that we’re not there yet, but we want to be.”

Arkansas was re-accredited in 2017 after significant hiring efforts. This year, it also debuted a summer writing and multimedia camp for minority high school students. As Reed said, the work is ongoing, but more concrete efforts are being made to ensure the school’s education remains one of the best.

Reward

Journalism programs usually cite their isolation or poor pay while struggling to recruit and retain minority faculty members. Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, was judged non-compliant for the diversity standard by the ACEJMC when reaccredited in 2016. The site report spoke about the university’s relative isolation, and, “The Department also acknowledges that salaries may not be high enough to effectively compete for these candidates.”

Which is perhaps why the most successful schools at hiring diverse faculty are often private. Texas Christian University, which is nearly 25 percent URM students in its j-program, has a 20 percent URM full-time faculty. Its yearly tuition is also a little more than $60,000. NYU, which had a 15.6 percent URM student population in 2013, had a full-time journalism faculty that is 24 percent URM. Its tuition is closer to $70,000 a year.

Simply put: The universities that can compete are the universities that can compensate.

For a demographic that is historically underpaid, asking underrepresented minorities to accept an underpaying job for the sake of diversifying staff is more than naive; it’s insulting. But this isn’t the only reason faculty of color might move out of academia.

Keonte Coleman, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, wrote his doctoral thesis on how black journalism deans work within predominantly white institutions. Conversations showed that these deans often become figureheads for change, and either aren’t as effective as they wish to be or feel solely responsible for their institution’s lack of progress.

Coleman said, “In order to see more faculty of color, you have to see more leaders of color, and to do that you should have more people of color on hiring committees.” And while some faculty view this as an opportunity, “It becomes a burden for those leaders of color or faculty of color when they are all on these committees.”

How does this become a burden? Isn’t committee-participation important in academia?

“Service is weighed in very low on the tenure-promotion scale,” Coleman explained. Tenure and promotion are based on three things: Teaching, publishing, and service. Which means that more committee responsibilities means less time spent with students or research, and the harder it is to be promoted. This is what’s called the “invisible service burden.”

Retain

Coleman also sent out a survey looking into journalism school values. “I found that ‘creating an inclusive culture’ was near the top, but ‘recruiting and retaining people of color’ was somewhere towards the middle, usually, or even more towards the bottom.”

Scholarship on mentoring and its direct effect on students can be a bit hard to find, but there are a few detailed studies in the STEM fields. In the ASHE Higher Education Report issue focusing on mentoring undergraduate students, researchers found that:

“Mentoring efforts can be effective in addressing key issues and problems currently facing colleges and universities across the country, including the need to increase degree completion rates, reduce inequities in outcomes for marginalized and underrepresented groups, and broaden participation in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline and workforce.”

“Whole point of education, and really journalism, is to make the conversation inclusive.” Robert Hernandez from the Annenberg School of Communication says that improving diversity in newsrooms is imperative to creating quality journalism. He’s supported by many others, particularly brown and black journalists, who have pointed out how white newsrooms fall short.

Colleges face budget cuts, low student enrollment, department politics and a host of other obstacles when trying to create institutional change. This might explain some of the lack of diversity. But institutions also create obstacles for potential faculty that signal to minority faculty, much like it did to Mike Day, that their experiences are not valued as highly as others.

Coleman found many academic jobs required a PhD, or some graduate school, “It just automatically limits the kinds of people who are going to apply … We’re going to have to get creative about how we open up that field.”

Coleman isn’t saying that hiring standards should be lowered for faculty of color. Rather, that journalism schools should learn to value experiences that come without a diploma. This would benefit more than just journalists of color, and would allow journalism students to experience mentorship from a diverse range of backgrounds.

Hernandez thinks that it’s not that faculty of color are pushed out of the job, but rather, they are pulled in a different direction after their efforts are left unrecognized. He teaches in the field of web journalism with drones, AR, 360 video and similar technologies, and works with faculty that teaching coding.

“There’s no pipeline problem,” he insists, “The industry says journalists of color who can code don’t exist, and frankly, that’s bullshit.”

“They have to ask themselves, am I doing fulfilling work?” Nobody goes into journalism academia to make money. When a larger salary comes along with a job that promises to value their work more, journalists pack their bags and leave, no matter their race.

Diversity in journalism becomes more prevalent in online discussions every day. It won’t be enough to for newsrooms and j-schools alike to talk about diversity without seriously considering the reasons the conversation is necessary. The problem needs to be addressed in its many roots.

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Here’s the data I used for journalism school statistics.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash.