HOUSTON-- Nov. 2003 – What if the American education system strongly supported diversity but didn’t reward faculty for their efforts in this regard, only placing value on research and publication? Would this inequity cause faculty to avoid any efforts on behalf of underrepresented minorities?

This month, a report entitled Factors that Influence Science and Engineering Graduate Student Diversity: Results of a Rice Survey, was released which addresses this issue. The report was authored by Richard Tapia, Rice University’s Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Cynthia Lanius, former Executive Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice, and Baine Alexander, a researcher with the LEAD Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The report details the results of a survey of Rice’s science and engineering faculty, which was designed to determine:

1. faculty’s views of diversity as an institutional, departmental, and individual goal;
2. their opinions of the effectiveness of Rice’s efforts to increase diversity; and
3. their recommendations for new strategies that Rice and research funding agencies might implement.

The purpose of conducting the survey was to try to understand the factors which are involved when faculty members successfully promote diversity at the graduate level. Two major conclusions were reached. First, it found that “well-prepared minority students are in short supply”, but that faculty should continue to address the problem by supporting current students with belief, encouragement and advocacy. Secondly, the report states that “faculty must be rewarded for this effort”, to compensate for longer and more difficult hours spent working with students who will benefit from mentoring. It also went on to say that universities, and perhaps federal funding agencies should do further studies, possibly with the aim of changing the current university reward system to include a commitment to diversity.

In the closing paragraphs, a 1999 quote from Rice President, Malcolm Gillis, sums up the essence of the report by saying “Anything that diminishes an institution’s ability to recruit a diverse student body should be a matter of serious concern”.

The entire report may be accessed online at http://ceee.rice.edu/Books/DV/facsurvey/index.htm (html version) or http://ceee.rice.edu/Books/DV/facsurvey/facsurvey.pdf (pdf version)

— Michael Sirois