CIRTL Forum: June 18th, 2008
MSI Session B : Talk

[Introduction by Katherine Friedrich]: In the following CIRTL Forum session, speakers describe what the minority serving institutions where they work are seeking when they hire new faculty, and what future faculty can expect when applying to their institutions.

[Orlando Taylor]: We had such a good time the first time, we're still on a high from the last session. My name is Orlando Taylor, I introduced myself before on the panel. I'm not going to say much here, my colleagues will do all the talking, or most of it. I'm the Dean of the graduate school and Vice Provost for research at Howard University in Washington D.C. And before I introduce our panelists this afternoon I should say to you that we had a rather difficult time in trying to get a panel that would represent the full range of minority serving institution because, as I said earlier, they are very diverse. They are public institution and they are private institutions. Some are research oriented universities, and some are community colleges. The faculties come from many disciplines, some are full professors, some are junior faculty just beginning their academic careers. And so, to try and find a mix of people sufficiently broad to give you a flavor of what these institutions are looking for has been somewhat difficult. But this is what we came up with and I think we've pretty much hit the mark with the exception of the fact we don't have a person from a community college or a person from a liberal arts colleges that's classified as an HIS or TCU or an HBCU. These terms you get used to saying all the time if you're in the world of minority serving institutions, we call them MSI's, and we contrast them with TWI's which are traditionally white institutions. So you have this whole alphabet soup of different names. So we'll try not to overdo that, and say a mouthful each time we bring these terms up. I'm joined today by three individuals. To my immediate left is Professor Kelly Mack. Dr. Mack is a professor of biology in the department of Natural Science at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. It's a public institution, a regional campus of the University of Maryland. It is a formerly, in the days of segregation in the state of Maryland, it was a land grant school for blacks in the state of Maryland. Today, it is a doctoral granting institution, offers PhD's in five or six fields, several masters degree programs, and many undergraduate programs. Dr. Mack is a full professor and in fact chairs the promotion and tenure committee for her university, and so she is very much in touch with the kind of faculty that the institution wants and rewards and retains. To her immediate left is Dr. Clytrice Watson.  Dr. Watson is an assistant professor at Delaware State University which is near Wilmington, near Philadelphia. It too is a historically black institution, more focused on masters degrees than undergraduate degrees than I believe the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. It is not a regional campus of the University of Delaware, it is an institution that has a growing diverse population of students and she'll tell you about that perhaps. And she will speak from the vantage point of being a recently hired, I believe three years now, member of the faculty at Delaware State University. To my far left is Professor Olac Fuentes. Professor Fuentes is an associate professor of computer science. I believe born in Mexico …

[Olac Fuentes]: Yep, that's correct.

[Orlando Taylor]: … who is now a member of the faculty, tenured, at the University of Texas at El Paso. He can speak about this institution which is one of the largest Hispanic serving institutions in the United States, he'll give you more demographics about that. I'm from Howard University, and I'll make occasional fill in remarks. Howard is an institution of about 12,000 students, a private research university, was a research one in the old Carnegie classification system. Offers a PhD in about thirty disciplines and about forty five master degrees areas, and many professional schools and colleges including the College of Medicine. With that now, I will turn to the panelists, they're gonna talk about the kind of people that their institutions look for, and I'll add, and retain on their faculty because we're not just interested in hiring faculty, but interested in retaining them, tenuring them, promoting them to hirer ranks. Dr. Mack.

[Kelly Mack]: Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining our panel this afternoon. Again, I am the chair of the promotion and tenure committee at my institution and it's from that perspective that I will share my comments. First thing that I would say is that we evaluate promotion and tenure candidates based on a one hundred point scale. Fifty points are allotted for teaching, thirty points for research, and twenty points for service, and so that gives you some idea of what is valued at the campus and by how much we value it. And so I'd like to talk about those specific areas with regard to what we look for in successful faculty. With regard to teaching, we've talked an awful lot this afternoon about the need for cultural competency, the need for our faculty to be able to relate to our students who are largely African American on their level and on their terms. And when we talk about cultural competency it does stretch across all of the areas, teaching, research, and service, and it lends a lot to how we teach our students in terms of the kinds of examples that we use in class when we're trying to relay certain concepts to students. But it's not limited to race, in terms of cultural competency. I am African American, I teach African American students, but I don't assume that I am completely aware of what students at that particular age between 18 and 19, what's relevant to them, what is important to them. So I spend a lot of time watching television shows that I normally wouldn't watch that have no critical value whatsoever so that I am able to have conversations with my students that are relevant both to inside and outside of the classroom. I would be embarrassed to tell you the kinds of television programs that I do watch [audience laughter], it really is embarrassing. I'm ashamed myself. But nonetheless, it does facilitate dialogue between my students and myself and it contributes to what I am referring to as a holistic approach towards teaching, taking the entire individual and all of their background and everything that is important to them in trying to teach concepts in the classroom. Then in terms of research, we have faculty who come to our institution who might come from research intensive or research extensive institutions where there is a rich infrastructure for research, where technicians are available and supplies are available, equipment, etcetera. If it's not available in your lab, you only need walk down the hall or go upstairs to someone else's lab, and such may not be the case at a Historically Black Institution, or at a small liberal arts institution either, depending on where the institution is in terms of developing it's research focus. And so oftentimes we might find that new faculty will come having this rich experience in the research and suggesting that they are able to do research but they are met with an empty room. And it's not that they can't do the research, but they haven't gone through those exercises in setting up a laboratory from ground zero and understanding that you really shouldn't order pipettes tips if you've got no pipettes, and that flasks need to hold the media in which you grow cells, etcetera. And so, then coupling that with the fact that it would take time, so that if you've done your ordering and you've only ordered pipette tips and you get it all in and you're ready to start and you say, "Oh my gosh, I forgot the pipettes", then that's another lengthy kind of process, and at the same time the tenure clock is going constantly. And so what I would recommend if this were my world, what I would do is incorporate assimilations of laboratory set ups in the graduate training experience, so that we are forcing graduate students, regardless of what kind of environment you are getting your degree in, that you understand what it is to create a laboratory or to set up a laboratory from absolutely nothing in the room. I think that will speed up the process and certainly minimize the stress in getting those publications for promotion and tenure. And then finally, in terms of service, what we are finding, I go to a lot of forums where individuals are telling graduate students and post docs that they should guard against doing too much committee service and that essentially, you should just say no. And at our institution, we hire someone as a new faculty member in a tenure track position, we are committed to getting that person tenured and promoted at all cost. So while our institution doesn't offer start up funds and it doesn't mandate lower teaching loads, those of us who are senior faculty do all that we can. So we will bear the burden of some of the classes of the new faculty person until they get acclimated to the environment. We will do what we can with existing funds to funnel some to new faculty so that they can get some supplies and get their labs started, etcetera. And so when you have an individual then who arrives in an atmosphere like that and all they've been taught to say is, "no", to committee service, and "no" to collaborations, then it creates a huge disconnect and the person is labeled as being non-collaborative and uncooperative, and that can spiral into some detrimental kinds of situations and circumstances for a new faculty person. So, if I were, again, if this world were mine, I would in graduate school, implement training in self-advocacy, in critical analysis of the environment, in being able to read people, etcetera, such that when an individual arrives in the atmosphere or circumstance that I just described, that they understand that perhaps it's not best for me to continue to say, "no" all of the time, and that that would then lend itself to better success and earlier success along the promotion and tenure route.

[Clytrice Watson]: Again, my name is Clytrice Watson, I'm from Delaware State University. I'm a junior faculty, I'm going to my third year in the department of biological sciences and I just want to point out a few things that I find useful for my survival of the hazing process so to speak, because it is a hazing process, but one thing that I find beneficial is the ability to communicate with the students. Because HBCU's have a diverse population of students, it is so important to be able to communicate with the students both in the classroom, as well as outside the classroom. And when I talk about diversity, I'm not just talking race or ethnicity, but I'm talking gender, social backgrounds, age. I've had students old enough to be my parents, I have students that are young enough to be my children, I have students that are my age. In the past, I've actually taught my high school teachers children. So it’s an interesting group of students, but you have to be able to communicate with all these different groups of students. Social background is a real big important, it's a really important one because you have students coming from different spectrums of that social ladder, so to speak. Some at the lower end, some at the higher end, and in between. And from those different spectrums come different attitudes, different problems, different learning styles. And you have to be sort of in tune with these different personalities so you will know how to better or best deal with an individual or each student on an individual basis. Another point that I find to be important is social and political awareness. As an instructor, as a faculty member, I think it's so important to know what's going on in the world around you socially and politically because you can ultimately incorporate these things into your classroom or in your research activities. I listen to a wide variety of music, I have children so I need to be aware or what my children are listening to, but also, I want to know what students are listening to so we can engage in conversation as well as television shows. For instance, CSI has caused this tremendous increase of students who are interested in pursuing a forensic science degree. Delaware State now offers a forensic biology program and we have a lot of students coming in because they want to be CSI's. But we have to debunk that myth, that it's not what you see of TV, it's been glamorized, and you really need to understand and appreciate the science that's actually driving these concepts. Another issue on the political side is if you go to CNN.com like I do everyday, you would notice the trend in the number of individuals being exonerated for crimes that they had served 20 plus years for and they actually had not committed the crime, and this is based on DNA evidence. And if you look at those faces you see that they mirror the faces of the students that we serve, so that's also contributed to the number of students who are pursuing a degree or career in forensic science. The one thing that I've engaged in conversation with, particularly with minority students is the anger that they feel about these trends and about these events, and you have to redirect their energies and their ways of thinking not to go into this because you're angry, but because you really enjoy science, and you really want to make a difference. So that's something that I think the political awareness and social awareness has really been an asset to me to be able to deal with the students on that level. And thirdly, time management skill and multi-tasking abilities is so important to be successful as a new faculty member. And I say that because, and institution like mine, where teaching is still a priority but it doesn't get the same amount of credit as the research, you're still teaching, but you're still required to do research, you're still required to write grants, and obtain external funding, you're still required to mentor students and anything else that your chair person or your dean decides that you're good at and they want to dump on you so to speak. You have to be able to bring some kind of balance to that, and plus have a life outside of your job. It's so important to have a life. If you've ever seen faculty who don't have a life, and that work all the time, they're not very happy people. So you need to have a life outside of work. And its important to be able to merge all these things together and make them work for you. I take, like my research, I'm a food microbiologist, and I integrate what's going on in the food industry to my laboratory to get my students to really have an appreciation for the science that we're doing, and to give an example, I have a graduate student who is working on the efficiency of commercial sanitizers in removing salmonella from tomatoes. Well guess what, a couple weeks ago an article broke on CNN and yahoo.com about salmonella outbreak associated with tomatoes, so I called her up and told her to go on the computer, and she's like, "Oh this is great, this really brings some validity to my project", and she just got excited all over again because she was losing that "umph" about her project. So it's important to be able to bring these things into the teaching environment, albeit, the classroom or the laboratory. So these are some things that are working for me, now I have not mastered the time management, multi-tasking thing. So if anyone has any tidbits of knowledge you would like to contribute, I'm very open to listening. That concludes what I have to say.

[Orlando Taylor]: Professor Fuentes please.

[Olac Fuentes]: Ok, so, first let me tell you a little bit about UTEP and the community it serves. UTEP belongs to the University of Texas system. It's located in El Paso, which is western, extreme western Texas. It borders New Mexico to the North and all Mexico to the south. El Paso has about 700,000 people, and it's sister city of Juarez has about twice that, the whole region has about 2 million people. UTEP is a Hispanic serving institution, we have about 20 thousand students. Of those, about 75% are Hispanic American, most of those Mexican American, 10% are Mexican citizens who commute normally every day crossing the border from Juarez. And 15% are other. UTEP is classified as a research university with high research activity, and I guess that corresponds to the Carnegie 2 classification, which means that it is one of the top 200 universities in the country. It's stated mission is the advancement of the region through knowledge, and in particular, it's committed to providing access to excellence. That means, it's not an extremely selective university, in fact it's not open admissions because it only accepts 98% of the applications, so we're not open admissions, but almost. But the other part of the mission is access to excellence, so that means that despite the fact that we don't pick the best and brightest, we are committed to providing the best education so that students get opportunities to produce peer reviewed papers and go on to grad school in top universities and so on, and we have actually a very good record of doing that. A little bit about out students, the average age changes semester to semester, but its normally between 24 and 25. So that's pretty high, so we have many non-traditional students, many people returning to school, many students who have children and take essentially forever to finish. Most of our students work, a big percentage of those work full time. I think between 40 and 50% of our students work 40 hours a week or more. And most of them are first generation college students. So at the risk of over generalizing a bit, I'll tell you some of the cultural features of our students, of our Hispanic students. So first of all since most are first generation college students, they lack role models and guidance. So for most of our students in the places you are starting, the parents will have attended college, so they'll tell them how to transition to college life, what's good, what's bad, how to attack certain problems … we don't have that. So for us, that mentoring has to be done by the faculty. Another common feature is that families play a very important role, particularly extended families and all that. That's very important and that can be good because they can exert some pressure on the students to succeed, but in some cases it's not so good because family members, since most of them didn't attend college, don't really understand what college is all about. So very often, there is pressure to take jobs when they aren't really necessary. They tell them, well if in high school you were attending 25 hours, now you are down to 12, and in college you were working, now you're supposed to work now. So things like that, those aren't very good. There's also pressure to stay at home, which is good for us because they stay in El Paso, but even students who could have access to other universities will stay there. There's a reluctance to stand out. That was in the previous session, I was telling about a study that chose four white Americans popularity increases somewhat linearly with GPA, the better student you are the more popular you are. For blacks, it goes up until a little until about 3.25 I believe, and then it goes down seriously. So if you have a GPA up to 3.25, you're ok, people will start disliking you if you get better than that. For Hispanics, the effect is a lot more dramatic. From 0-2.5, it's flat, after 2.5 it goes way down. So there's a lot of pressure not to stand out. If you praise a student in front of his classmate, you're actually doing them a disservice. You have to be careful with those things. They normally lack self-confidence, so I normally invite my good students to join my research group and they are very surprised when I do that. "You sure you want me to work in your research group? Why is that?". Then I have to explain, well I think they will be very successful. And there is also a very strong sense of respect for professors, and that's commonly good for us, but it can be misguided, and it is misguided in many situations. I teach, among other things, computer programming, and I normally write programs on the board, and more often than I would like to admit, I make mistakes. I write the wrong identifier number, I forgot to write a parameter, something. And very often I notice those mistakes when I'm erasing the board after finishing the class. And it's unbelievable that 50 people  are looking at me, actually copying what I have written. Not a single one of them will notice the error. So what happens? All of them notice the error, or maybe at least half of them, but they feel bad about telling me that I made a mistake. And that's a bad thing. You have to try to educate them to tell them, "well, you're paying to take this classes. If I make a mistake, you have to complain, and if you notice it, maybe some other people won't notice it, so if you tell me how to correct it then people have the right things in their notes". Now as far as what we're looking for in faculty, that's both for hiring, for hiring we look for the potential for doing all those things, and for giving tenure we look for actually having done all those things. So first of all, it's potential for research, and that's common in most universities. So what we mean by this? So first of all, it's the potential to attract funding, that's a surprise I suppose. Well, we are like normal universities, we like people to have grants and to have publications, peer reviewed publications, so that's normal. What is slightly different is for us, incorporating students, incorporating undergraduate students in research is very important. So, how do you do that? Well, you try to recruit in your undergrad classes. You have to do it carefully, I was telling in the previous session that one of my colleagues had a nice research group with about ten undergraduates, then I made the observation that none of them was Hispanic, in a university that is 85% Hispanic. So why is that? I asked him how he recruited people, and he said, well when I teach a class when some student … well, I work with students in two ways. One is that people approach me and ask me to join my research group, or in classes when somebody asks a very good questions and shows lots of interest I invite them to join my group. And I told him, well, you're discriminating in both ways. Since Hispanic students normally don't have much self-confidence, they won't have the degree of self-confidence that will require them to walk into a faculty members office and tell him or her, I want to do research with you. And also, they won't ask questions. They feel maybe disrespectful, they feel they will, that will make them stand out. And after I told him that, I think he has been more successful. He's up to now fifty-fifty or something like that, which is still not quite where it should be, but it's improving. You need to have the potential for attracting students and in particular, we mean here graduate students and just like most other universities, most of our graduate students are international, India and China are the big providers of grad students. So you have to have a research area that is interesting, you have to have a nice web page with pointers to papers so that people who are outside the country can notice your research. Another important thing is to find a niche. It’s difficult to compete with the CMU's and the MIT's and the Stanford's, so we want something that is mainstream but not too mainstream so that the big universities are doing exactly the same thing that you're doing. That can be challenging. One example I can give you is a natural language person, does anyone here know what natural language is? Enabling computers to understand languages spoken by people. So there's a lot of work done in English, some work done in Spanish. There's a person doing work on the mixture of both, which we hear all the time in El Paso. So that's one thing for which we're in the right place to study. So that's a nice example of finding a niche, and there are many, many others. The potential for teaching; here the challenge is to be able to teach students with widely varying levels of ability. In Texas, if you graduate in the top ten percent of your class, you can go to any public university in the state. That's by law. Turns out that 56% of the students from El Paso who graduate in the top ten percent go to UTEP, which sounds strange, shouldn't they all be going to UT-Austin, which means that we have a fair number of very good students. But since we are open admissions, we have a large number of not-so-good students. So you have to adjust your teaching for that. How do you make sure that everybody learns? How do you make sure that your class doesn't become awfully boring to the real bright kids? And that's a challenge. Then, the other one is teaching students with varying levels of commitment. You have people who work 45 hours and week and you have people who the only thing they're doing is go to university, so how to accommodate those two? And that's difficult, we've had people who have tried to become very strict and end up failing 90% of the students, and well that's probably not a very good thing. And finally, potential for service. In general, in all minority serving institutions, service is more important than in research universities. So here what is important for us is outreach. The El Paso area doesn't have … UTEP is the only situation of higher education. There are no big museums or there's no NASA, no nothing like that. So the only source of knowledge is the university. So it's important to do outreach to the community, go to the high schools, convince students that doing science is good, attending college is good, and so on. Mentoring. Since most of our students don't have to guidance from their parents, this has to be done by faculty. We have programs to mentor children of agricultural workers of which we get lots and lots, and participation in those is viewed as an important thing. And also, advising, we don't have professional advisors after the first year of students stay at UTEP. So after the first year, they are advised by faculty. So you have to essentially train yourself to be an advisor and we're trying to go towards holistic advising. It's not just course selection, it's professional development, personal issues, career choices, and so on. And I think that's all I wanted to say.

[Katherine Friedrich]: This podcast was produced by the Center for the Integration of Research Teaching and Learning. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers 0227592. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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