To better prepare students for an increasingly diverse society, campuses across the country remain engaged in efforts to diversify the racial and ethnic makeup of their faculties. However, faculty of color remain seriously underrepresented, making up 17% of total full-time faculty. In the past 20 years, more than 300 authors have addressed the status and experience of faculty of color in academe. From 1988 to 2007, there was a continued rise in publications addressing the issue of the low representation of faculty of color. This article presents a literature review and synthesis of 252 publications, with the goal of informing scholars and practitioners of the current state of the field. Themes emerging from these publications and an interpretive model through which findings can be viewed are presented. The analysis, with a focus on the departmental, institutional, and national contexts, documents supports, challenges, and recommendations to address barriers and build on successes within these 3 contexts. The authors hope that this article informs researchers and practitioners as they continue their work to understand and promote the increased representation of faculty of color.

This article examines the experiences of faculty women of color at predominately White public research extensive universities. In the wake of legal challenges to affirmative action, such as Gratz and Grutter, and the proliferation of antiaffirmative action state “Civil Rights Initiatives,” these issues become critically important. This study's central questions were, “What are the lived experiences of faculty women of color in predominately White institutions? ” and “What are the implications of legal challenges to affirmative action, such as Gratz and Grutter, for faculty women of color and their institutions? ” Twelve 90-min focus groups were conducted with 51 faculty women of color from a wide range of academic fields and disciplines, from all regions of the United States, and occupying tenured/tenure track ranks (assistant, associate, and full professors) to further understand their experiences, feelings, and reactions in light of the affirmative action Supreme Court cases. Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Race Feminism (CRF) serve as frameworks to guide our analysis. One main finding is that faculty women of color across three disciplinary areas (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM], Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences [SBE], and Humanities/Arts) experience a knowledge gap on the impact of public policies on their everyday lives. Faculty women of color, along with experiencing the typically documented conditions of tokenism, also report that communication about diversity initiatives and resources on their own campuses was extremely uneven and idiosyncratic.

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