When Aaron Campbell was appointed to be an assistant professor of special education at the University of Missouri in 2023, she became the first Black tenure-track faculty member in her department.
Campbell is one in a cohort of Black professors at MU that has technically increased in the last decade, but only by a small amount: from 2013-2023, the number of Black professors rose by less than one percent — from just over 3% to 3.78%, according to data collected from the National Center for Education Statistics.
By comparison, the university’s total professoriate expanded by about 10% in the same time period.
According to the 2020 census, 12.4% of Missouri’s population is Black — an indication that the number of Black faculty at MU is not representative of the broader state.
“I definitely think that people pay a lot more attention to race at Mizzou than they do at other institutions,” Campbell said. “I've had students tell me I'm not only [their] first Black professor, but first Black teacher ever.”
According to self-reported data on MU Analytics, in Fall 2025, there were just 85 Black faculty out of 2,231 total professors — about 3.8% of the professoriate. From that number, just 36 have tenure or tenure-track status, compared to 1,000 professors total with the ranking.
Campbell said she has become a support for Black students who seek her help — even those she’s never had in class. Though she used to recommend that students report discrimination to the Office of Institutional Equity, Campell said she no longer does because she’s been disappointed by the outcomes.
“I realized that office is actually not [there] to help the student, and it’s not to help the faculty,” Campbell said. “It is just there to stand on the side of HR and help fight whoever is mad.”
The treatment of students she’s observed has led Campbell to question staying at MU. She’s also factored in messaging she’s received from other Black faculty, whom she says mostly work from home.
“You need to stay out the way, girl, stay out the way if you want your check,” Campbell recalled other Black professors telling her when she asked why they work remotely. “That's literally what they say: ‘I survived here that long because I stay out the way.’”
A ‘mass exodus’
Despite the technical increase in Black faculty at MU, former professors still describe what’s felt like a “mass exodus” in recent years.
Stephen Graves left his professorship in the Black studies department in 2022, after at least six other colleagues departed within six months.
When he started his postdoctoral research at MU in 2016, after a year of anti-racism protests on campus that received national attention in 2015, Graves said he and other Black faculty were optimistic.
The student group Concerned Student 1950, which led the calls for change in 2015, listed in its demands that, “by the academic year 2017-2018, the University of Missouri increases the percentage of black faculty and staff campuswide to 10%.”
“Okay now, this is our chance to kind of strike while the iron is hot,” Graves said. “There’s actually some momentum there, and I think that was their feeling inside. And I think that was true and genuine.”
But a political science professor called him an “activist” at one of his first faculty meetings, and Graves said he quickly realized that MU’s push for change felt like “a facade.”
“I could tell right then that I was going into a situation where there was a climate that was not going to be conducive to progress,” Graves said.
In his six-year tenure at MU, Graves said he witnessed a de-prioritization of Black scholarship — several classes in the Black studies department were moved to political science, and Graves felt they received less advertising, while other initiatives, including the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, took center stage.
“They just knew that they had to placate and hold on tight for just a little bit,” Graves said. “There was just a window that they just had to get through, and that once the dust kind of settled a little bit that they could go back to as norm.”
Graves said it was a safer decision to leave MU and join the political science department at Oklahoma State University.
“I did that strategically and on purpose because of my experience at Mizzou,” Graves said. “If they could get rid of the department or merge it with something else, it would be gone. And I'm not having that happen again.”
Missouri’s culture
Graves said the decentering of DEI efforts at MU, including the recent dismantling of race-based scholarships and the office of Inclusion, Diversity of Equity, parallels Missouri’s political environment.
This fall, university president Mun Choi announced at a fundraising gala that MU currently has its highest-ever appropriations from the state, which professors don’t see as a coincidence.
For Devin Fergus, a Black studies professor who also left in 2022, that rings true. The administration’s pivot away from diversity initiatives is, to Fergus, a shortsighted attempt to appease state lawmakers at the expense of the university’s long-term health.
“Mun Choi has to respond to the state legislature. The state legislature has to respond to the voters of Missouri,” Fergus said. “So what's happening off campus is shaping what's happening on it.”
At MU, Fergus felt respected as an endowed professor, but said the racism he experienced off campus is what drove him to leave.
Shortly after moving to Missouri, Fergus recalled the NAACP issuing a travel advisory for Black motorists on Interstate 70 for the first time — a sign for him that the state’s environment wasn’t welcoming.
“It's not ‘Midwest nice’ when you're in Starbucks and they're threatening to call the police on you, or you're trying to rent a car and they’re threatening to call the police on you,” Fergus said.
Fergus said these things happened in Missouri, but in no other places he’s taught: in Ohio, Tennessee and now, California — at Claremont McKenna College, a school that also held protests against racism in 2015.
Just last year, MU banned two teenagers from campus after they drove near the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center and yelled racial slurs at Black students.
Comparing MU to others
Other university presidents with strong ties to Republican-led legislatures have faced criticisms similar to Mun Choi.
At Purdue University in Indiana, for example, former governor and then-university president Mitch Daniels faced backlash in 2019 for describing a high-profile Black scholar he was trying to recruit as a “rare creature.”
And like MU, other regional public universities of similar sizes have also had problems recruiting more Black faculty.
Across the institutions analyzed — in Georgia, Illinois, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska and Wisconsin — Black faculty representation averaged around 3.7% from 2013 to 2023.
But special education professor Aaron Campbell said she felt more collegiality at her previous institutions, including her alma mater, Texas A&M — a university in a similarly conservative space.
“The ability to be comfortable being Black was a lot better there,” Campbell said. “And that's in a very red space.”
At MU, she said, the lack of "checks and balances" leaves her feeling precarious.
“I think we're going to continue to lose Black students and Black faculty, because who wants to be in a space where they feel unsafe?”
University officials declined an interview for this story. In a written statement, spokesperson Christopher Ave said the university “does not tolerate discrimination or harassment on our campus. All reported cases are investigated, and individuals who violate our policies or the law are held accountable. Potential consequences for those who commit such violations include being trespassed from campus, expelled from the university and charged with a crime.”
How we compiled the data
For this series, Missouri School of Journalism Data Desk students Mariia Novoselia, Muhammad Saurav Rahman and Anna Sago downloaded the most recent data on enrollment, degrees completed and faculty demographics by race from the National Center for Education Statistics’ IPEDS Data Center and pulled data for Mizzou and nine comparable universities.
Students in David Herzog’s introductory data journalism class then analyzed the data for changes since the 2015 campus racial protests. The student teams also produced interactive graphics with the Missouri News Network Infographics Desk.
Madi Hankel and Jacob Miklas focused on full-time ranked faculty.
Yazin Merayyan, Ralph Sternadori and Tyler White focused on enrollment.
Wei He and Jack Smith focused on degrees completed.
