New Study Explores Health Impacts On Black Professors In Academic Workplaces

Black professors constitute only 6% of all faculty in U.S. colleges and universities, compared with 14% of Black students.

A group of Black professors is banding together to launch a first-of-its-kind study: the Black Professors Study (BPS). This national institutional initiative will create the first integrated epidemiologic, governance, and legal dataset on Black faculty in the United States.

While it’s proven that diverse faculty can improve research innovation, student success, and institutional accountability, Black professors remain underrepresented and structurally unsupported, according to those leading the study.

The dataset is designed to generate “actionable evidence” for university leaders, policymakers, legal stakeholders, and public health leaders to strengthen faculty equity, institutional accountability, academic governance, and inform population health strategy.

According to Pew Research, Black professors constitute only 6% of all faculty in U.S. colleges and universities, compared with 14% of Black students.

As BPS researchers point out, faculty of color continue to report challenges related to workload distribution and institutional climate that may have significant implications for their well-being and retention. Unfortunately, institutions lack systematically collected data on health outcomes among faculty of color, hindering the development of evidence-based interventions.

The BPS will begin at Columbia University before expanding nationwide. The study will include 1,000 Black faculty from diverse U.S. higher education institutions, using stratified random sampling to ensure a representative sample across key dimensions, including institution type, faculty rank, tenure status, and disciplinary field.

This pilot will examine relationships between workplace experiences (e.g., grant terminations), productivity (e.g., time spent working on publications), sleep (e.g., sleep quality), and mental health (e.g., anxiety) among faculty of color.

“BPS is built to support institutional redesign. The initiative applies population health methods to examine how institutional and legal structures shape the health and career trajectories of Black faculty,” said Dustin T. Duncan, ScD, principal investigator and associate dean for health equity research at Columbia University.

He continued, “We are developing a dataset that can inform how universities govern, policies function in practice, and the law (including court decisions) shapes the lived realities and health of Black faculty.”