Chapter 22: Critical Race Theory: An Ethical Appraisal of Gradualism Related to Diversity Inclusion at Predominately White Institutions (PWIs)

Every day is Sunday when African Americans serve a PWI as faculty. They sense that PWIs are learning institutions that have not been forthcoming in efforts to encourage and promote the ethics of faculty and student diversity. As Sunday morning is one of the most racially divided days in the United States, African American faculty across disciplines work in the PWI environment where the reality influences their comfort zones. Though there is a perception that colleges and universities are the cradle of liberalism, faculty and administrative voices advocate but fail to deliver best practices hiring African American faculty. The passage of civil rights laws broadening educational opportunities for African Americans to attend PWIs did increase the numbers with college degrees. However, PWIs lag-behind in the diversification of faculty across disciplines. This ethical absence of action by PWIs reflects the political position Francis Wilkinson (2008) reports about the 1970 Daniel Patrick Moynihan memo to President Nixon suggesting “benign neglect” that Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades. This de facto conduct since the sixties and seventies of PWIs resembles “benign neglect” despite frameworks within PWIs designed to promote solicitation and hiring of African American faculty; progress weans, and urgency of language persists in a whisper.