While the Summit focused on leadership, the importance of representation, quality, quantity, and climate of participation in science and engineering education and careers was explicit. The purpose of the 1.5-day conversation among 60 faculty, federal agency, and other leaders was not to lament, document, or explain the problem of minority leadership^§. Rather, it was, in the language of organizer Richard Tapia’s invitation letter, "to develop an effective action plan to present to universities, industry, government, and funding agencies that gives very specific suggestions on ways to develop critical national minority leadership." ^§§

Speaking as individuals, excerpted below in unattributed quotes from the Summit’s 187-page transcript, participants engaged in a dialogue. Topics ranged from broad issues such as academic practices, to more nuanced points about subcultural and individual differences that predispose some to risk-taking and others to risk—aversion.

Perhaps the personalities endowed with the former make some more likely than others to emerge as leaders. Should not risk-taking thus be encouraged and developed? But when does it become threatening to others and counter-productive? There are many correlates of cognitive and professional styles. Sex, race, and ethnicity may merely accentuate the differences and carry significant career repercussions. As one participant put it:

What looks like confidence often in white male students and is rewarded as a young man who is kind of smart and cocky, in a woman is abrasive and in a minority male is arrogant.

One participant returned home and felt so passionate about the confidence issue that he wrote the following:

Possibly the most important factor in the development of more outstanding minority scientists ready to attain positions of leadership is confidence. In conjunction with hard work, raw talent, and intelligence, it will overcome the possible deficiencies of a disadvantaged educational background. If you look at the leaders of today, the attribute that really stands out is confidence.

The most important outcome of the Summit, however, was a consensus for action now. Recommendations were offered on what needs to happen. This report elaborates in terms of who needs to assume leadership if minority scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are to increase their role in a variety of professional communities, in academe and out, now and throughout the 21^st century.

Focus of the Dialogue

The Summit provoked unusual candor about careers, institutions, professions, and cultures. We try to capture here the remarks that relate to various dimensions of leadership: academic practices, the role of information, career paths, why sponsors matter, and subcultural differences in "negotiating" social reality. All quoted material comes from the Summit participants. It represents recurrent themes around which the dialogue crystallized, prompting subsequent discussion of the possible actions reported in the section that follows.

Academic Practices. Many observers claim that the current academic culture tends to reward research and subordinate all else. Because institutions of higher education, especially research universities, are the chief knowledge production sites for the nation, this should not be surprising. However, as the competition for research funding has intensified, the culture has adapted by, depending on one’s perspective, narrowing or entrenching the research role at the expense of teaching and service to the professional or local community. In short, there has been the embrace of a single "research" model by a range of institutions whose mission would suggest a broader commitment to education, outreach, and public service. The upshot is that human resource development, including the creation of future leaders, suffers: it is not explicitly recognized as a wise use of faculty time. Indeed, the extra time and effort required to mentor a minority student who is capable but unprepared is seldom rewarded.Accountability for "failures" — those who change majors or leave the institution altogether — is focused on the student, not the faculty or the administration. Losing the precious few is a failure that we cannot afford.

The Summit addressed the academic practices that serve to support certain members of the campus community — students and faculty alike — and not others:

People who want to go into science enter [higher education] saying, "I want to go into science and mathematics," and they are so bowled over by the institutions that they end up leaving those fields. They may end up getting the degree in something else because they're good students but they didn't advance our cause … How do we hold those programs and institutions accountable?

At the same time, it is hard to ignore the role of sponsors’ influence on the campus reward system:

Put the money in places where you can't get it unless you agree to take on [a minority student] and if you don't you can't do any research. . . But if you aren't willing to make some major changes in the way we do business in terms of graduate education and research in America, you aren't going to solve this problem …

… leadership by presidents in graduate admissions? Graduate admissions is a cottage industry … run by departments and faculty who have different motives, different motivations — to get labor to support their research, pure and simple. Leadership by the federal government? Science is done today through the labor market of the research grant, be it an RO1 from NIH or an NSF award or a DOE grant.

The agency culture and the professoriate culture are not distinct cultures, particularly within NSF. NSF is based on peer review process. Peer review means that you send the thing out the door, and it goes exactly to those people who are in the offices down the hall from me …

Make it a requirement for federally funded academic research that the PI has to include a plan to address graduate and post-doctorate diversity issues within that PI’s program. . . Also include a similar plan for the [PI’s] own department and a letter from the university president supporting this.

Participants spoke at length about support mechanisms for students. Fellowships, traineeships, and research assistantships all offer financial subsidy. But each provides a different kind of experience because the locus of control changes from student, to department, to faculty PI, respectively. There is no optimal arrangement and like all human relationships, some faculty-student, mentor-apprentice relationships flourish while others fade. Again, accountability for outcomes was stressed at the Summit:

Do we give the money to the student? Do we give the money to the institution? Do we give the money to the researcher? We either raise the floor for performance in those places or we shut them down. . . Either they get better or they get shut down. The role of policymakers within universities, particularly boards of trustees, has to force some accountability to help put the appropriate pressure on our president and administration …

… training grants should be vertically integrated, that is, there should be support for students starting at the undergraduate level through graduate training and to the post-doctoral level, and this can be done within as well as between institutions … One of the benefits of this kind of a program is that you can create what we termed a "learning community." The second is the idea of establishing a national postdoctoral training program for minority students … these fellowships would be given to departments as opposed to individuals and to those departments that have a track record for placing fellows at top research institutions as faculty members.

Career Paths. The result of innovations in accountability is that faculty and students, as well as the institutions that employ and educate them, adopt a proactive posture toward career development, skills, and the information to make choices on paths to pursue. Summit participants noted that:

… it's not unusual to find a lot of underrepresented minority Ph.D.s who had an undergraduate experience either at . . . a historically black college or university, a minority-serving institution or a community college.

… criteria for determining merit never include track record of producing persons of color with doctorate degrees. People like _______ are "boutiques" at many of our institutions. The question is how do you make this systemic?

The things that produce excellence do not necessarily grow out of these institutional programs. So, we've got to find a way to support those activities that build excellence, that build confidence.

… students have to know a lot about what the possibilities are, what the options might be and be able to make very conscious choices, real choices about what they're doing. But we talked about tapping the experiences. How does one make the best use of those sorts of experiences to craft programs that are going to be useful for what they do with their emerging leaders?

A common denominator in these remarks is information — how much do we have, what do we lack, how do we share in a timely way what is known with the people who need it? This is not a research issue, but a dissemination and technical assistance need. There is also a dimension to data, however, as framing reality in unhelpful or misleading ways:

And there is no information that is being collected right now to show that in a systematic way that there are different outcomes to different groups depending on how they're being supported.

The speaker both overstates and understates the case. Data are collected, but the categories can mask what decisionmakers need to know. The 2000 Census form invites respondents to check off all categories of ethnicity as opposed to selecting one, as has been done in preceding surveys. The opportunity to declare one’s "multicultural" identity should be revealing. Statistically, the numbers will be small. But symbolically they may speak volumes.

For example, the category "Hispanic" or "Latino" includes such a diversity of groups — Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Cubans, Central Americans, etc. — that the subcultural differences among them overshadow their grouping under a single designation. Put another way, diversity can mask the extent of underrepresentation. Historically, their educational experiences and achievements also diverge, so clearly there is a need to disaggregate further and become sensitive to what’s in a definition and how does that translate into expectations and opportunities — decisions about admissions, qualification for support, prediction of probability of degree completion, etc.

The on-site implications of such information are formidable:

There are mentoring programs in industry. We don't have mentoring programs for the junior faculty to show them how they should be preparing for leadership or how to act in a professional manner.

As one Summit participant noted, "professors need professional development, just as teachers need professional development." These faculty mentoring programs would have to be university-specific. How one succeeds at a university depends on the culture and traditions of that particular institution and may not bring success at another.

The kind of faculty professional development needed is not the typical sensitivity training and sexual harassment seminars that become a legal exercise disconnected from academic culture. Rather, it is imperative to instruct faculty on the compatibility of human resource development with recognizing the subcultural differences that students bring into the classroom, on gender differences in classroom participation, on learning styles, and on the difference between faculty advising (with a specific narrow band of concerns) as opposed to mentoring (supporting a student’s broad range of needs, answering questions unrelated to academics per se, extending networks to model future professional behavior, in general, being a good listener and counselor). Above all, reminding all members of the campus community that diversity is a strength and all, regardless of academic credentials or age, have areas for continuous improvement, knowledge, and skills acquisition.

Making Leaders. The problem of minority leadership in science, mathematics, and engineering is embedded in cultural milieux that will not change overnight. Indeed, today’s academic culture is a microcosm of currents in American culture. Changing it demands realism: culture is stodgy, conservative, reliable, and predictable. Efforts at inclusion represent disruptions and require adaptations of "the way things are done." Humans resist such change as uncomfortable; often we question the need.

In the year 2000, with demographic projections in hand, the need for change toward growing segments of the U.S. population is no longer arguable. How to change is. That is why leadership is such a critical commodity. In the words of a Summit participant: "The places that I've seen where we make a difference is when we actually get into power and positions of making decisions." Elaborating, another explains, "If we understand ourselves best, then we should speak for ourselves and not continue to have those who study us speak for us. In this way we can impact change and national policy first-hand."

To become positioned for recruitment to leadership in an academic career, one needs to climb the academic ladder — complete the Ph.D., get hired based on early publications and recommendations (if one does not enter the professoriate, one cannot exhibit the qualities and acquire the experience antecedent to leadership status), distinguish oneself as a productive faculty researcher to secure tenure, be promoted to full professor and assume local administrative responsibilities while sustaining an active research program that is (inter)nationally respected. Others added:

We just need a handful, right? A very small fraction of any group becomes the leaders. It would be a much more focused approach, a much more cost effective approach, if we would focus on those places that are doing reasonably well and make them better than to focus on the places that are really doing badly.

Who will become the next chairs and deans of your departments in terms of that kind of leadership? First, you need the credibility of tenure, of senior stature, of accomplishment in research before movement to the administrative rungs of the academic ladder is within reach.

We should look at four kinds of leadership that we need to make happen. There's the academic and research level, which is what most people have been talking about here, which is necessary. Leadership in academic management because they make the difference in what the culture of the institution is. Leadership in government and policymaking. Those will make changes. And one we shouldn't forget is leadership in K-12 education because universities do have a role there. If we keep our eyes fixed on those four . . . borrowing again the phrase a "thousand flowers blooming," you will get a few leaders.

Minorities serve on thousands of committees, but they seldom are asked to chair them. It's as if they are afraid that we will either run away with it or do nothing. We are perceived as being either too passive or too one-dimensionally aggressive to lead.

The path to leadership in the corporate sector, in a large company or as head of a small high-tech venture, is no doubt different from policy leadership in or outside of government. If one subscribes to the approach that a common core of skills and characteristics distinguishes effective leaders, then sector and type of organization should be a lesser concern than providing a training ground for leadership that evolves as careers unfold.

NSF’s Singular Role. The National Science Foundation has been pivotal among federal agencies in supporting the participation of U.S. minorities in science and engineering. The agency’s programs fund many of the institutions represented at the Summit. And with that funding come expectations that NSF can, and must, do more to fulfill its congressional mandate in human resource development. ^§§§

NSF is an appropriate audience for the report [because] . . . it should be able to leverage its own ideas, its own sources to help build the connection with the and private sectors.

There is continuity in a continuum of support and interest, and coherence across the continuum … NSF already supports programs in the K through 12 arena. It supports programs at the undergraduate level, at the graduate level, at the postdoctoral level, the faculty level, yet one does not necessarily see the connection among those activities …

We must help to diversify NSF. A lot of us senior faculty have to say "Yes, we will spend a year at NSF and if you give us an appropriate position, we can actually make a difference."

This body can declare that the system is broken … You want to know what federal agencies do with [rotators and visiting scientists] and you want the entire program to be restructured so that minorities … can participate at an equal level.

The capstone of the NSF suite of programs would be one directed to leadership beyond formal education. Professional development of leadership would be a kind of training that augments skills and adds capability to an already-productive scientist or engineer. Leadership skills are often considered "non-technical," i.e., interpersonal, communicative, charismatic, and highly idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, although some have more natural propensity for it, leaders are made, not born.

^§ For a list of participants, see Appendix B and for an evaluation of the meeting see Appendix C.  

^§§ See Appendix D for Tapia's opening remarks, which offered a framework for the proceedings.

^§§§ NSF's 1980 reauthorization, modified but still in force, directs the agency - uniquely - to increase participation of women and minorities, and now persons with disabilities as well, in science and engineering.