"White, black and Hispanic undergraduates each comprise more than a quarter of the student body, and Asians account for more than 15%," said CUNY Vice Chancellor Gloriana Waters recently. The school loves to boast about its Crayola box student body, but faculty members come mostly in white. At a recent hearing on staff diversity, or the lack thereof, council members complained that of the university's 7,214 faculty members, only 12.3 percent are black, 8.3 percent are Hispanic and 10.5 percent are Asian, reports the Daily News.
In response, Waters explained CUNY's affirmative action policy while the graduate school's president protested that minority applicants aren't drawn to Ph.D programs because they take so darn long, and after 8 1/2 years a professor's pay doesn't measure up to that of a lawyer or doctor. But Councilman Charles Barron, who's railed against racism before, didn't want to hear it. "If we're the new majority, then we should be a majority of the faculty," he said.
