Research institutions are the primary producers of the nation's scientific brain trust. Yet, the record of these institutions for producing African Americans in these disciplines is spotty. In this feature, Black Issues examines the experiences of three of the leading science and engineering institutions, citing examples of strategies that are yielding favorable results and those that leave senior scholars scratching their heads over why they're not working.
In any given academic year, Roland Allen's travel schedule can take him as far north as Alaska and as far south as the Virgin Islands. As the director of minority recruitment and admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he admits that this year the affirmative action backlash that is sweeping the country is making his job a little tougher. But not for the reasons you might think.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, institute is a private research university in a state that, so far, has not experienced any legislative or judicial effort to limit affirmative action. So Allen's challenges are not like those facing his colleagues in California or Texas, where affirmative action has been severely curtailed. Allen's problems are more a matter of perception.
"Even good people sometimes are anti-affirmative action," Allen says, seated in his spacious office on the first floor of MIT's main administration building. The orderly workspace complements the recruiter's neat, preppie persona. "It is a struggle for some people to support what we're doing here," he adds with a countenance of angst.
Allen, who is African American and has been in the college recruitment business for nearly two decades, has observed in the past year that an increasing number of African American and Latino students don't want to be admitted through affirmative action.
"It is becoming harder and harder to do minority events," Allen says. "People will sometimes angrily reply [to invitations], saying, `You've admitted me and now you're telling me I'm in a special category.'...
