CIRTL Forum: June 18th, 2008
MSI Session B : Q&A

[Introduction by Katherine Friedrich]: The following question and answer session from the CIRTL Forum 2008 explores what future faculty can expect when applying for jobs at minority serving institutions. The presenters are Kelly Mack, professor of Biology at University of Maryland Eastern Shore; Clytrice Watson, assistant professor of Biology at Delaware State University; and Olac Fuentes, associate professor of Computer Science at University of Texas El Paso. The moderator is Orlando Taylor, vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school at Howard University.

[Orlando Taylor]: Just as I did the last time, I'm going to … I'll start with a question. One of the things I brought up in the earlier panel was really a request, or a charge to students to consider a faculty career at one of the minority serving institutions knowing that there are some people who believe that, "I couldn't fit in there". If someone asks you, first, Professor Fuentes, do I need to speak Spanish, or does one need to speak Spanish to be able to teach at a Hispanic serving institution? Is it going to be a problem? And for my colleagues from HBCU's, since I'm a white person, am I going to be ok? Am I going to be accepted on their faculty?

[Olac Fuentes]: Ok, so I'll start with the question of speaking Spanish. In my department we have fifteen tenure track faculty members, two of those are Hispanic, and two speak Spanish. And they are the same, I guess. I'm the intersection. So the answer to that is, no. You need to have a willingness to learn the culture, and that's enough. It's certainly a plus.

[Orlando Taylor]: How about HBCU's?

[Clytrice Watson]: You do not need to be black to work at an HBCU. My department has fifteen faculty members, I am the only minority female, black female. So, I'm serving double duty. You just really need to be open minded and understand the diversity amongst the students and be willing to embrace those differences.

[Orlando Taylor]: Dr. Mack?

[Kelly Mack]: I would echo the same, particularly Dr. Fuentes comment that you have to be willing to embrace the culture and to learn about the students so that you are able to take a more holistic approach to your teaching. We do have white faculty on our campus and in our department which is the department of Natural Sciences, I'm reminded of one instance. We have two training programs that are funded by NIH on our campus, and we were looking for someone who could assist us with directing those programs, and the individual who we selected was a fairly new faculty person and she is white. So we approached her and talked to her about it and she came back to me and she said, "I just have one concern". I said, "Ok, good. I have one concern too, but you go first". And she said, "I'm white". And her fear was that she would not fit in and she could not assimilate with the students and what I said to her was, "As long as you care, they will know that you care and they will respond accordingly".

[Orlando Taylor]: One side bar, Dr. Mack mentioned the grants, you should know that, this was the last question we got in the last panel was, why should I …this is from a faculty mentor from a major research university, why should I encourage my students to apply to an HBCU? So we gave them several examples, and if we're asked again, we'll give them to you again. But one I want to make sure you hear is that many funding opportunities for you that you can only apply for if you're at a minority serving institution, many of which carry very large sums of money. So there is some competitive advantage and some funding competitions to be from these institutions. And of course you can always apply for everything else. But now the floor is your for questions or comments or rebuttals or observations or what have you. After we charged out to the audience earlier today to saying that I would hope that students would widen their horizons and their visions and the faculty mentors encourage their students to consider the full range of hiring possibilities for their students. The floor is yours. Tell us who you are so we'll know who we're talking to. Thank you. We're going to bring a mic to you. And if you don't hear us, we'll get the mic too.

[Audience Member]: Cindy Lynch, Purdue University, and I teach the Preparing Future Faculty course there and I have teamed up for a couple semesters with a professor at Morgan State University to develop a, well she developed, I modified for the classroom, a tool to help students identify skill sets perhaps that would be needed in different types of institutions, and obviously she developed it based upon her experience as a department chair in mentoring new faculty. So my question is this, what was the largest, or some of the challenges new faculty face at minority serving institution based upon your own experiences in the classroom?

[Orlando Taylor]: Now I'm presuming you're referring to challenges that go above and beyond those that you'd face at any institution. Is that correct?

[Audience Member]: Actually, both.

[Orlando Taylor]: Okay.

[Audience Member]: So that they could see, and compare and contrast experiences.

[Orlando Taylor]: Okay. Who wants to go first on that?

[Olac Fuentes]: I can start. I think the first one is to deal with students with varying levels of ability who are normally very different from the ones they faced as teaching assistants. I was a grad student at the University of Rochester, that's a very homogeneous population, very good students. So it wasn't hard to work with them. It was pretty easy. And where I am now, we have everything. Some very smart students, some not so good, some very committed, some not so committed, and so on. And the second one is to learn the culture. Learn to interpret what they do in the context of the culture. If you interpret what they do in the context of yours, that leaves room for lots of misunderstandings. If people don't ask questions, its not that they aren't interested in what you're saying, for example, people don't volunteer to do things, same thing. It's not that they don't care, it's just that because of their culture they are reluctant to do those things.

[Clytrice Watson]: Just to piggy back on Olac, dealing with some of the challenges that the students face with their educational background. A lot of our students come from inner cities or schools that were not the best as far as educating or preparing their students for college. But the biggest challenge that I have faced is finances to fund my research. I didn't receive start up funds, and my institution is a small institution so internal research dollars didn't exist for me, so I really had to scramble to get my research program started. So, writing grants and finding funds was crucial for my survival in that regard.

[Audience member]: Were there resources there at the institution available?

[Clytrice Watson]: We do have like internal grants, such as professional development rewards, and center for teaching and learning. They're small; $2000 - $3500 …

[Audience Member]: What about the infrastructure? Does it help you write grants or seek it externally?

[Clytrice Watson]: Yes, now our dean offered several grant writing workshops to prepare you. So those things are in place to assist you in achieving those goals.

[Orlando Taylor]: I'd like to weigh in slightly on this, and say that when one thinks about leaving a major research institution like a Purdue, and go to a smaller institution, lets say as Purdue University – Calumet, it's a different environment. It's teaching focus is heavy. The support for research is different, and so some of the challenges you might see at minority serving institutions are not because they are minority serving, but more because of their focus and their type and their size. They are not the flagship public university of the state, they may be a regional campus, or it may be a small teacher's college. That's the first issue, the other issue is, and this, I think most of the minority serving people will say this, it's incredibly what the faculty accomplish in the context of what resources they have. That they get … as an environment that is not one that is, for sake of a better term, dog eat dog, the competition for status is not the same, it's more of a communal flavor. Dr. Mack in the previous session said something about the fact that, they bring a faculty member in, they are invested in that person getting promoted and getting tenure. It's not a sign of status that three came in and only one got tenure, it's the other way around. Maybe you want to comment on that yourself, but I think that the big benefit of a faculty member is that they're going to an institution that is increasingly looking like the way the county is looking and becoming. One, it's totally committed to service, and if you have a desire and a passion for your research to have some application for increasing the quality of life of human kind, and those institutions are great at that, and while they might not provide the start up funds that you might get of 3, or 4, or 5 hundred thousand dollars at say a major research university, you get some other human things, and support from faculty colleagues and perhaps access to grants that they otherwise might not have gotten early in their career at other kinds of institutions. That would be my take on that, Kelly, do you want to make a comment on that?

[Kelly Mack]: The only skill, I agree with everything that has been said, the only skill set that I would add that I see new faculty struggle with is academic advising ... and being a while … and curriculum development as a whole. Because we are expecting new faculty to take existing courses and revise them, and revamp them, and bring them into currency with national trends that are happening in that particular discipline, and also develop new courses that would fit into a recommended course sequence for a student in a particular major. And so, there is no point, other than by trial and error, at which new faculty learn how to academically advise a student. And by academically advise, I mean not just, look at the catalog and figure out which classes need to come first, but when the student is standing in front of you and the class is full, how do you manipulate the schedule, how do you drop this and add that, and how do you then track your students for the four years and ensure that at the end of the fourth year they've got all of the requirements that they need given that the student may not come and tell you on a regular basis what they're taking and how they're doing in the classes, yet we hold advisors responsible for students getting to that point in their graduate. So I would say academic advising is a big missing skill in our new faculty.

[Orlando Taylor]: Yes, tell us who you are.

[Audience Member]: My name is Jadaida Eisler, I just finished up my first year in grad school.

[Orlando Taylor]: And where are you from?

[Audience Member]: Yale.

[Orlando Taylor]: Yale, ok.

[Clytrice Watson]: Be proud of that. She hesitated there.

[Audience Member]: My question … I'm still working on it. My question is kind of, so, there's sort of the group that's historically vested in minority serving institutions, they go back because they went, they're parents went, they're interested in the community, whatever. But, what is the strategy for attracting other students that are sort of looking at the dollar. So, you said you don't have a start up package. I just went to the Research One session and they talked about a million dollar start up package. So, for me, I'm personally vested in those schools because I went to a HBCU as an undergrad. So, you may not have a start up package, but I'm still probably going to come. But how do you get students who are like, when I can equally weigh all of them, I can get a million dollars over here or learn how to grant write over here.

[Kelly Mack]: I think it goes back to some of the personal kinds of support systems that Dr. Taylor referred to at minority serving institutions. When new faculty is hired on our campus, we do all that we can to make sure that this individual gets promoted and tenured, and so we will take some existing funds and funnel, shuttle, whatever we have to do to get to that individual if it means that you have to come and use some of my supplies until you can get enough preliminary data to apply for your own grants. If it means that we have to take some funds from some existing training grants to come up with your summer salary for the first two years … we’re not just going to leave you out there with no summer salary. That almost never happens in our department, everybody gets summer salary through one method or another, and that is not mandated by the institution.

[Orlando Taylor]: Let me respond also to that, first of all as I tried to imply earlier there is a wide range of HBCU's and they differ widely. There will be start up funds at some HBCU's, if you go to Howard, you're gonna get a start up package. You're not going to get a million dollars, and a million is not a norm in a research university by the way, that might have been an exceptional case, that's an exaggerated case, not a norm. I think the comparisons have to be institution type by institution type. If you're gonna look at say a Delaware State University what a start up package is, compare it to Southern Connecticut in your town, and New Haven, and then it would be comparable to a Southern Connecticut. So your choice has gotta be, it seems to me, first, type of institution. If you want a research institution, you can start looking at packages that are somewhat in that arena, but if you go to a regional campus, or if you go to a teacher's college, or community college, measure that way. Than I think cutting on that slice, these institutions would be in the ball park. They may not be the same, but they're in the ball park.

[Clytrice Watson]: You also have to consider what your personal commitment is. I chose to be in an HBCU, that's where I received all of my formal education, HCBU's, and I feel that's where I can make the biggest different. Working with students, like me, who have similar struggles that I had, who face similar obstacles in society that I faced. And in my mind, if I can inspire someone and they can look at me and say, "This black woman made it, why can't I?", then I've served my purpose well.

[Orlando Taylor]: Tell us who you are.

[Audience Member]: I'm Nate Moorehouse, I'm at Arizona State University, I'm a graduate student about to finish up. I actually grew up right across the river from the U or R in an inner city neighborhood, 19th ward, so. But that's incidental.

[Orlando Taylor]: What town was that again?

[Audience Member]: Rochester.

[Orlando Taylor]: Oh, Rochester. Yeah, sure.

[Audience Member]: I'm just curious if there are resources online to look at the different kinds of institutions that fit into the different categories and where we might go to explore this a little more.

[Orlando Taylor]: You might go to the U.S. Department of Education website, and then you get into it, click on post secondary education, and you will get a listing of all of the institutions by type, and by year of founding, and so forth. Or you just might  just click on HBCU, and you may get them. You certainly can go to HACU, that's a website. HACU is the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, they have a very good website. There is one called NAFEO, the National Association for Equal Educational Opportunity, NAFEO, which is basically the HBCU one. I don't know the tribal college one, but I think if you just Google them you will get that. There is a range of institutions, and I do want to reemphasize the fact that I liked Dr. Watson's comment about the personal commitment piece, and the personal commitment piece may not be that the people look like you. The personal commitment may be that you want a society in which access to higher education is available to everybody. So, if that's a need of yours, then that's a good place, is a good institution for that. I graduated from the University of Michigan, and I left Indiana, I was on the faculty at Indiana, don't hold that against me since you're from Purdue. And I left a Big 10 university to go to Howard. I wanted to do that because I was at Indiana for five years, I never had an African American student, not one. I produced many students, never one. And I felt a personal need to do some of the personal things that Dr. Watson mentioned. At the same time, most of us are not cut off from our professional colleagues. We still maintain affiliations with our national professional societies, we still publish in the same journals as everybody else, we still compete for the same grants, so while you may get, your day job may be in a particular kind of institution, you don't isolate yourself and marginalize yourself in the larger professional community of your discipline. And in some ways you'll find HBCU folk present in more meetings than some of colleagues at other institutions because we value making certain that our student and our faculty are active participants in national professional societies, so maybe my other colleagues may want to comment on that. Is that true for you at UTEP for example?

[Olac Fuentes]: Yes, definitely. Also our start up packages, we do offer competitive start up packages, no millions, but between 100 and 200, and also what Orlando said about there being grants for which your not eligible unless you work in a minority serving institution. So I think it's those two things, that's where you can make a difference. Students at Stanford will succeed no matter what the faculty do to prevent that, and UTEP you can really make a difference, if they succeed, you normally have something to do with it.

[Orlando Taylor]: The other thing, and I advised Dr. Mack in the previous sessions, I may as well do it, give you equal time. You look at what can happen at these institutions in terms of what the graduates do, it's remarkable. Dr. Mack's colleagues, I always get the number wrong, but I think, she currently has about 35 students pursuing PhD's for the biological and life sciences. That's an incredibly record, and I think if you ask most faculty at Yale, how many students do you have currently pursuing PhD's from undergraduate school? More importantly, Southern Connecticut, how many students do you have pursuing a PhD from the biology department? You ain't gonna get 35. How many have MD's, and are doing MD PhD program? How many at Yale or Johns Hopkins and Harvard, or in your case are doing it? They come from these institutions, the institutions that might have had that empty room you described when they started the faculty. I think that's the issue. The point it, bottom line, what do you want to do for yourself, and what is your passion, and where is your fit? Questions from this side of the house?

[Audience Member]: My name is Marina, I'm a third year graduate student at UCLA, and I had a question about, I'm a product of the UC system, undergrad and graduate school, hopefully not Post Doc, but all I know is the R1 type lifestyle, the mind set, I've got the blinders and everything. You know, it's research, research, research. But, in terms of career quality of life and ability to support and have your own family, how do the MSI's compare to the R1's? How do the Minority Serving Institutions provide everything that someone who is research bound and who thinks  science is not only amazing but critical for advancement of society, how does that compare in terms of other top universities.

[Orlando Taylor]: May I try?

[Kelly Mack]: Sure.

[Orlando Taylor]: First of all, I think that no one here would say that everybody in this room ought to seek out a minority serving institution. We need to have faculty in all types of institutions and we need to have progressive minded faculty, we need to have women faculty, particularly in the STEM fields, at all types of institutions. So, the fit issue, I forgot who said something about fit earlier, somebody did during the panel upstairs, so the fit is a critical question. Now, for those who want the research university, and I speak for myself, that's what I did, I thought just like you. The reality is that only one of nine people are gonna get a job there. But more importantly, are the remaining eight, all eight of them maybe they don't want a job there. They want it, some people want a job in a place that's more undergraduate focused. I see Dean Lee back there from Hope College, Moses Lee, I'm giving you a free commercial for Hope College. Dean Lee is a dean at an institution, I think it's per capita more undergraduates in Medical School than any university or college in the United States. Is that fair to say? Is it somewhere up there Moses?

[Dean Moses Lee]: That's probably stretching a little bit, but ….

[Orlando Taylor]: It's a commercial, pretty high.

[Deal Moses Lee]: Pretty high. But in STEM education as well.

[Orlando Taylor]: STEM education as well. So here's a person who's not at the University of Michigan, but if he compares per capita what his students do at Hope College in the graduate and the medical school world, his numbers would compare favorably. And I'm a U of M graduate, I hate to admit to that, but he probably could say that. So that point is is that, people sometimes chose to decide … people should always make their stand in a place where they want to be. It's like, a mate, it's like a job, it's like a research career, you do because it's where you want to be, not because there's some external glamour that makes you thinks you want to be at a certain place, it's where your heart is. That would be my response, but I'll ask my other colleagues, what do you think on that?

[Kelly Mack]: I think in terms of lifestyle, there's no difference. I have friends at research intensive institutions and we can call each other, 7, 8, 9 o'clock at night and we're both in the office. Or weekends, we're both in the office. I think that that's up to the individual and whether or not someone has a family, or doesn't have a family, I think those are individual choices and you make it what it is for you, or what you would want it to be for yourself and for your own life regardless of the kind of institution. You'll work hard wherever you are to be successful.

[Clytrice Watson]: And I agree I have a family, I have a young family, and I enjoy working at an HBCU, but I think the struggles would be the same if I was at the University of Maryland College Park. You still have to produce, but you still have to have a life. So you just have to find that balancing point, or a mode of operation that works for your lifestyle. And it's doable. Many, many people have done it and are still doing it, and you can have it all, I'm a strong believer that you can have it all. I want it all.

[Orlando Taylor]: I think we're running over but I bet we can take maybe one more question since we're already late, we may as well get real late. Did I see another hand in the back of the room? Well hearing that or seeing that, I want to thank all of you. We've enjoyed very much having a chance to share our thoughts with you. I would hope that if you have an interest in a minority serving institution that you visit one, that you take a vacation, or at a professional meeting at a place like Atlanta you go to Park Atlanta University or Moorehouse College, or if you're in Washington, come to Howard, or UDC, in Baltimore, go to Morgan State. If you're lost and end up somewhere in Delaware go over to Delaware State.

[Clytrice Watson]: The casino is right across the street.

[Orlando Taylor]: I couldn't believe it. Thank you all very much.

[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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