Diversity and the Ph.D.
Woodrow Wilson released in June 2005 a major report, Diversity and the Ph.D.: A Review of Efforts to Broaden Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Doctoral Education. The report shows that, despite decades-long national efforts and some gains in enrollments, African Americans and Hispanics are still significantly underrepresented among recipients of Ph.D.s in the United States.
Robert Weisbuch, then president of Woodrow Wilson, stated upon release of the report, “The numbers make it clear: We still have a great expertise gap in the United States. Our next generation of college students will include dramatically more students of color, but their teachers will remain overwhelmingly white.
Woodrow Wilson mailed Diversity and the Ph.D. to hundreds of leaders in higher education—deans, presidents, and provosts of research universities and officials of major national educational organizations. Numerous educational leaders have requested additional copies of the report to distribute to senior colleagues to foster discussions about how to improve diversity in doctoral programs.
Media response to the report was similarly positive. Articles appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post (subsequently syndicated to more than 100 other newspapers), Black Issues in Higher Education, Carnegie Corporation Reporter, and other publications.
The report makes seven major recommendations:
- Communication. Programs must learn from each other and coordinate efforts to avoid overlap and gaps. This can be achieved by creation of an active consortium of organizations committed to the improvement of minority representation.
- Research. By assessment, educators can learn what strategies work and which do not. Longitudinal data is particularly necessary. More understanding and less reductive politicking on all sides will lead to better results—and a better society.
- Vertical integration. Graduate education, and especially doctoral education, must make alliances with efforts at school reform in K-12, ensuring that young students learn about the opportunities for an advanced degree. Graduate education must also form alliances with community colleges, with their population of students of color.
- Intellectual support. Doctoral education and the various disciplines may engage in habitual practices—from the nature of student orientation programs to what is considered important in an academic field—that serve as a subtle discouragement to interest for students of color. The image of the doctorate, discipline by discipline, must become less abstract and more socially responsive in a non-reductive way.
- Mentoring and professionalizing experiences. One of the few verifiable results gleaned from actual experience demonstrates the importance of a wide range of mentoring activities, for all students but especially for students of color. Systems of financial support for minority students must not obviate participating in such professionalizing experiences as laboratory work in the sciences and teaching experience in all disciplines.
- Race and need together. These two efforts to even the playing field need not and should not be made oppositional or alternative to one another. Criteria such as need or “first in family, although important, will not secure the same results in improving racial and ethnic diversity as programs frankly treating diversity as a goal.
- Leadership. The various federal agencies that have required programs to include faculty and students of color and to demonstrate their inclusiveness have, at the same time, provided little guidance or assistance to support these mandates. The federal government must take a more active role in such efforts.
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