Summary Statement by Presidential Panel:
Amy Gutmann (chair), University of Pennsylvania
Lawrence Bacow, Tufts University
William Brody, Johns Hopkins University
Elizabeth Hoffman, University of Colorado, Boulder
Patrick Swygert, Howard University
Leon Tarver, Southern University at Baton Rouge
Henry Tisdale, Claflin University

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At its best, the pathway from college to graduate training to successful careers as faculty, researchers, and administrators in higher education is fraught with obstacles.  The preparation is arduous, the choices made at each stage consequential, the opportunities uncertain, the competition fierce, the final goal – usually a fulltime tenured faculty position – distant, and the road very long indeed.  This is true for any young person considering an academic career.  For members of underrepresented minority groups – African-Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Pacific Islanders, Alaskan Natives – and especially, for women within (and without) these groups -- the challenges are doubly daunting.  The role models are few, the temptations of other careers compelling, the remaining barriers of discrimination, hostility, harassment, and neglect too often subtle, demeaning, and stressful, the competing demands of families heartrending, and the riptide of cultural counter-forces and ethnic identities perplexing.

Where are we?
While the production of Ph.D.’s in all fields has increased almost four-fold in the United States since the mid-1950s, that growth has reversed somewhat over the past decade.  Since the late 1970s, the academic job market in most fields has generally been constricting, rather than growing.  In this context, recruitment, training and placement of underrepresented minorities in academic positions has slowed after making relatively rapid progress through the mid-1990s.  Since then, minority Ph.D. completion rates have remained roughly constant.  However, the attrition rate for underrepresented minorities in graduate study is higher still than the 40-50% for all students, even though few discernible academic differences exist between those who complete their degrees and those who do not. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences where students are far more isolated during their graduate training than in the sciences and engineering.  Along with isolation, and the social and developmental issues it raises, it is clear that financial concerns – especially as students begin to assess more realistically the financial prospects of an academic career – play a considerable role. Debt burdens have a differential impact on minorities.  Similarly, quality of life issues (such as the quality of mentoring, flexibility of hours, availability of childcare, and the rigid inexorability of the tenure clock), with their differential impact on women during childbearing years, may also weigh more heavily upon underrepresented minorities than the general population of doctoral students and junior professors.  The proportions of minority doctoral students and faculty in virtually all fields are still far from their percentages in the general population.

Why should this be so?  Minority enrollments in college have grown to historic levels, though in some cases, they, too, still fall short of true racial and ethnic equity.  Clearly, there are “leaks” in the “pipeline” that runs from recruitment and admission to undergraduate colleges, to the choice of major field of study and completion of the undergraduate degree, to application for graduate study, to admittance to candidacy for the Ph.D., to completion of the dissertation, to placement in a suitable academic teaching and research position, and ultimately, to advancement to tenure.  It appears that the greatest gaps in this continuum occur in the transition from college to graduate school – i.e., choosing doctoral study; in completing the Ph.D. – i.e., in attrition during graduate study; and in launching an academic career after completing the Ph.D. – i.e., confirming one’s choice of an increasingly arduous academic career  for which one has spent 5-10 years preparing.  Once underrepresented minorities enter the tenure stream, they advance at rates comparable to other junior faculty.

What we have seen, in sum, is that for many of the same reasons that academic careers appear increasingly undesirable to the best and brightest of all undergraduates, so, too, academic careers appear especially undesirable to first generation minorities while in college.  To make matters worse, the latter population of potential academics is often least familiar with the positive aspects of an academic career choice.  (The potential upside of this summary analysis is that making things better for minorities and women will make things better for others as well.)

What are the major challenges?
Addressing this situation presents a wide range of challenges.  Some of these the Leadership Alliance and other initiatives have already demonstrated effectiveness in attacking, particularly identifying talented underrepresented minorities in high school and college, providing early exposure to research experiences, creating mentoring relationships with faculty, creating peer support networks, and providing the fellowship support that is the sine qua non for those who do not otherwise have the financial resources to devote themselves to doctoral study and the pursuit of an academic career.  

However, we know from the Leadership Alliance’s experience over the past decade that role models play a particularly important part in making academic careers seem like realistic and desirable alternatives for minority students who have never previously imagined themselves on such a pathway.  Yet the plateauing of minority faculty hiring, promotion, and tenuring is a profound obstacle to further progress.  It is also a problem for which there is no quick fix – except continually to renew institutional efforts towards racial and ethnic equity in hiring and promotion.  We need to make more effective use of existing role models; to make them more visible and accessible to potential doctoral students; to recognize that their participation in targeted recruitment, research experiences, mentoring, and the other activities we ask them to undertake because of what they are must be adequately rewarded as part of their own academic career.   Assuming that such efforts are an obligation or responsibility they owe to future students like themselves places an unfair and intolerable burden upon existing minority faculty and exacerbates the already daunting demands of successful careers in research and teaching.  Bringing more minorities into recognized leadership positions in the academy is also essential.  Recognition for their leadership, rather than taking it for granted, is not only critical to further progress, it is also a simple demand of institutional equity.

Over the past three decades, academic careers have become much more demanding, even as we have sought to open them to previously underrepresented groups.  The overwhelming challenges posed by a successful academic career – even when compared with opportunities in other demanding fields such as law and business -- can seem singularly unattractive at key transition points in the pathway (especially, during self-selection for graduate study, dissertation completion, and entry into the academic job market).   The typical faculty member’s perception of quality of life is increasingly negative.  These perceptions are readily communicated to prospective students and doctoral candidates and are another major factor in our leaking pipeline to academic careers for both minorities and non-minority students considering the academic pathway.

Where are the major opportunities?
Every challenge brings with it an opportunity. The first is to maintain the momentum achieved over the past decade through the Leadership Alliance’s programs.  The enrollment data suggest that after the relatively great initial impact of the Alliance’s first five years, we are now merely holding our own rather than actually increasing the percentages of underrepresented minorities in doctoral programs. 

The second opportunity is to broaden the disciplinary focus of the Leadership Alliance and similar programs.  Many institutions have focused their efforts on the natural and biomedical sciences.  This is terribly important and must continue.  But it is also important the we ensure the presence of  underrepresented minorities across all of the other humanities, social sciences, and professional fields of academic research and teaching. 

A third major opportunity before us is to disseminate a systematic vision of best practices in graduate recruitment, mentoring, career planning, placement, and career development.  We must translate the positive experience gained by the Leadership Alliance and its members into a broad, national academic culture that is nurturing of ability and potential, welcoming to all, family-friendly, and rewarding in ways consonant with the ever-rising demands for scholarly and teaching excellence.  Such a culture will benefit both underrepresented minorities and the larger academic community.  It will ease the burdens on both minorities and women, while also helping all of our successors to live fuller and more satisfying lives in the academic workplace.

Fourth and finally, we have now the opportunity – indeed the necessity -- to assess anew the very structure and patterning of academic careers.  It is clear from recent national discussions of the role of women in some academic disciplines that this is not an issue for aspiring minorities alone – though it clearly has a differential and disparate impact on them.  We are in a negative spiral: we continually raise the expectations of excellence in both teaching and research, lengthen the years of preparation through post-doctoral fellowships, make tenure standards ever more rigorous, fail to dramatically alter the financial rewards available to faculty at all but the most well endowed and supported institutions, and refuse to adapt academic career patterns and policies to the needs of the women and minorities in two-career families whom we are increasingly attracting.  We are now presenting them with a Hobson’s choice as they seek to plan families and careers.  Put simply, if we do not change our own institutional structures and behaviors, we will make ourselves increasingly exclusive and decreasingly excellent.  We must answer the question:  How are we going to restructure academic life for the 21st century, break out of this negative spiral, and attract the very best and brightest undergraduates – particularly underrepresented minorities and women in science and engineering—to academic careers in today’s global marketplace?