Since 1989, a number of special committees and task forces have recommended increased minority enrollment. And in 2003, the Provost’s Diversity Action Council stressed the urgency of minority faculty recruitment and retention.
“There’s been an interest in establishing an internal pipeline program at Stanford for some time,” says education professor Patricia Gumport. And now the University is taking concrete steps to better prepare students from diverse backgrounds for academic careers. Gumport, the first vice provost for graduate education and director of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research, will lead the effort.
In her first annual report to the Faculty Senate in November, Gumport said she was thrilled to announce a $4.5 million program to launch two-year fellowships for graduate students in their last two years of doctoral programs. Their presence “will help diversify the professoriate.” DARE (Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence) fellowships will be awarded to 36 students during the next four years, and another $1 million fund will provide one-year acting assistant professorships for postdocs.
Gumport, MA ’82, MA ’86, PhD ’87, says Stanford considers “diversity” broadly. She sees the new fellowships supporting a range of underrepresented populations: women in the natural sciences and engineering; racial and ethnic minority students; first-generation college students; gay, lesbian and transgender students; and students with disabilities. DARE fellows will take courses in academic leadership and communication and learn about faculty life by “shadowing” professors in their disciplines. They also will be mentored by tenured faculty who are not their dissertation advisers.
“The level of concern and complaints [about advising] varies enormously by disciplines,” says Chris Golde, MA ’93, PhD ’96, associate vice provost for graduate education in Gumport’s office. Golde says graduate students in a lab science like chemistry often are subject to a “one-on-one relationship with a faculty member that can set up dependencies and unhealthy power dynamics.” By contrast, graduate students in the humanities, who work with committees of faculty members, “see fewer of those kinds of problems.”
Co-author of the upcoming The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the 21st Century, Golde interviewed hundreds of graduate students and faculty during a five-year research project funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Describing the effort to broaden notions of advising as “a national movement,” Golde says that “one of the questions we asked in our survey was how many faculty members students considered as mentors.” Students in the sciences said one mentor was typical, while those enrolled in history and English departments cited two or three. “They were like, ‘Multiple mentors? This is a news flash?’”
In addition to launching the DARE fellowships, Gumport says her office wants to find ways to reverse the declining enrollments of women and underrepresented minorities in advanced degree programs. “We’re losing a tremendous amount of talent,” she told the Faculty Senate. “Nationally, at every level, the numbers of women and underrepresented minorities are decreasing.”
Underrepresented minorities now constitute 24 percent of undergraduate enrollment, an increase of 20 percent between 1995 and 2007. But the percentage of underrepresented minorities enrolling in graduate programs stands at 8.5 percent, a decline of 13 percent in the same time period. “Why is that significant?” Gumport asks. “Because these are very small numbers that raise all sorts of questions in terms of what we are contributing to diversifying the academic pipeline.” And increasing the diversity of the applicant pool ultimately has a “tremendous amount” to do with who gets in, the vice provost says. “It’s not that we have thousands of underrepresented minorities applying to doctoral programs and they aren’t admitted. We need to get more applying.”
