Grooming the 21st Century Professoriate

 Despite Challenges Posed by Anti-Affirmative Action Initiatives, the Ph.D. Pipeline Continues to Deliver a Diverse and Much Needed Group of Young Professors

CLAREMONT, Calif. — With just one Black professor, five Latino professors and five Asian American professors on its roster of 75 full-time faculty members, the Claremont Graduate University here recognized that its faculty diversity efforts could stand further improvement. Enter, J.W. Wiley, a former aerospace company executive turned philosophy graduate student with a keen interest in faculty diversity.
In July 1999, Wiley became the assistant dean of academic affairs after having previously served as a special assistant to the provost and a minority student recruiter. One of his primary functions has been to help make the school a more attractive institution for Black and other underrepresented minority faculty.
Under his direction, the university recently established diversity programs with a minority student mentor program, a predoctoral and postdoctoral faculty exchange with Howard University and other initiatives.
And in addition to building internal programs, Wiley adds the school is seeking to align itself with national faculty development and recruitment programs to attract minority faculty.
"We have to attack the fort on as many sides as we can," Wiley says, adding that he soon hopes to affiliate Claremont with national faculty pipeline programs, such as the Compact for Faculty Diversity.
For the past three decades, a broad tapestry of support organizations, foundations, and universities have crafted graduate school pipeline programs to recruit, fund, retain and position Blacks and other underrepresented faculty of color to join the nation's professoriate. Participants in the most successful of these initiatives reportedly have higher retention rates and complete their degrees in shorter periods than the general population of doctoral students.
These programs are considered critical to institutions, such as Claremont, that are aggressively courting minority faculty.
The task of growing the nation's minority professoriate, long supported by major foundations and the federal government, saw considerable experimentation during the 1970s and 1980s. By the beginning of the 1990s, experts say support for such initiatives had reached a peak and verged on fueling dramatic increases in underrepresented minorities earning Ph.D.s.
Nevertheless, that dramatic movement forward hit a slowdown in the mid-1990s with anti-affirmative action initiatives taking the steam out of key programs.
"It has certainly slowed us down," says Dr. Ansley Abraham, the Compact for Faculty Diversity program director at the Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta.
At the end of the decade, however, higher education leaders and organizations are continuing to refine strategies to recruit and support underrepresented minorities. Despite the chill in affirmative action, experts believe now more than ever that programs undertaken this decade have created the strongest models to date for recruiting, supporting, retaining and graduating minority graduate students into careers as professional scholars.
One stellar corporate example is the Peat Marwick/KPMG-backed Ph.D. Project.
Begun in 1994, to increase the number of underrepresented minorities on business school faculties, the Ph.D. Project solicits doctoral candidates from among the ranks of minority corporate executives. Currently, 400 doctoral candidates are pursuing their Ph.D.s in business with support from the program. Barring attrition, the initiative expects to double the nation's production of Black and minority business faculty within its first decade of operation.
"Our target is minorities working in corporate America," says Dr. Bernie Milano, executive director of the Ph.D. Project.
"And there's a tremendous amount of interest," notes Milano, adding that 400 potential business doctoral students will attend a two-day conference this fall in Chicago  that introduces them to the Ph.D. Project and business school programs. 
Meanwhile, programs like the federally supported Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement program and the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship are gaining momentum in their efforts to prepare undergraduate students to enter graduate school.
Launched in 1988, the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship has steered hundreds of minority college students into graduate programs. By providing students with research experiences and mentoring, the program helps undergraduates make informed decisions about graduate school.
Of the 1,222 students that entered the program between 1988-89 and 1998-99 school years, program officials say 44 have earned Ph.D.s. Another 300 are in Ph.D. programs, and 400 intend to enroll in a Ph.D. or master's  program.