With a spike in Black and Hispanic college enrollment, junior faculty have an unprecedented opportunity to mentor minority students to graduation and into faculty ranks.
As a junior faculty member, Dr. John Youngblood faces a very different group of students than the relatively few minority faculty members who preceded him.
Youngblood, a Ph.D. graduate in communications from the University of Kentucky, is an assistant professor of English and communication at The State University of New York at Potsdam. He was the first Black scholar to teach in his department, and even won the department’s outstanding teaching award in 2004-2005.
Youngblood and the hundreds of other doctoral students and graduates I know through my work at the Southern Regional Education Board are not simply seeing diversity in higher education by looking in the mirror.
There is also more racial and ethnic diversity in their classes than ever before. Increasingly, the job of young minority faculty members like Youngblood will be to educate students from around the world — representing literally dozens of racial and ethnic backgrounds.
What a wonderful turn of events.
