Longitudinal Academic Mobility Patterns at Howard University

This paper examines academic mobility patterns at Howard University, one of the leading Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the United States. The work presented is the first investigatory and validation phases of the data analysis portion of a larger NSF supported project working to empirically study academic brain drain from these institutions. The project uses Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and university web pages to collect longitudinal faculty affiliation data at 11 HBCUs from 2005-2021. Preliminary results from Howard University indicate that while most mobile professors moved from the HBCU to primarily White institutions (PWIs) or other non-HBCU institutions, the proportion of faculty moving into HBCUs may be increasing. These patterns vary among disciplines. This analysis will help aid in robust future examination of academic mobility, institutional stratification, and the role of organizational factors in shaping academic mobility.