He hopes to help improve some of the Problems he says limit minority success, especially the lack of adequate or appropriate counseling regarding career options and transfer criteria.
"I think retention programs at the community college level are going to have to be beefed up. And we need to have an articulation agreement with high schools as well as the four-year colleges."
At 53, Hood says that he is happy with the way his life has turned out, although he could do without some of the renewed attention he has gotten for his historic first experiences at the university
"I was on the campus for a month and no one knew but the administration and that was the way I wanted it," he said.
Although he wouldn't choose to change his involvement in that piece of history.
"Now, when I walk around this campus and I recognize what has happened as a result of that it becomes a sort of melancholy, good-bad feeling. That it [the experience] was not all bad, but not all good. And that you wish it had been something different."
"But my reason for coming here has not changed and that was that as a student who graduated from high school in the state, I was entitled to an education in the state. And I shouldn't have had to pay an out-of-state tuition to go somewhere else to get an education," Hood said.
Hood, who has a two-year fellowship at the university, teaches an undergraduate seminar in contemporary social issues. Among the exercises he has had students do is compare the 1963 March on Washington with the 1995 Million Man March.
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