In the 2000 United States census, African Americans represented 12.3% of the overall population, Hispanics were 12.5%, Asians 3.6%, and Native Americans accounted for 1% of residents¹. These minorities, with the exception of Asians, are significantly underrepresented in the scientific community, which is therefore losing a valuable pool of scientific potential. Today, in the typical age range for doctoral students, African Americans and Hispanics together represent one third of the US population. However, recent data from the National Science Foundation (see Table 1) shows that African Americans and Hispanics together account for only 5% of the Ph.D.s in the biological sciences awarded in this country. Excluding the Ph.D.s awarded to nonresident aliens in this data set, only 6.5% of the doctorates awarded to US citizens were received by African Americans and Hispanics. This general four to five fold level of underrepresentation has been documented in other comprehensive studies of the data available on this issue². The level of representation of minority students at Rockefeller (see Tables 1 & 2), is higher than the national average for minority representation at the doctoral level, for example, in 2003-4, 14% of the US citizens enrolled here were African American or Hispanic. Although the university has minority representation higher than the national average, Rockefeller still has less than half the expected numbers of minority students based on a proportional representation of the US population of that age range.

Some of the present problems have a historical root. Racial injustices and economic deprivation chronically hindered opportunities for educational access for the African American community in particular. While the civil rights era brought an end to the most egregious examples of institutionalized racism, the problem of racism and inequalities in access to education still represents a major challenge for this country. Progress is certainly being made towards a more proportional level of participation of minorities in science, but the pace of change lags far behind improvements made in female participation in science, even though the women’s movement and the civil rights movement both reached mainstream consciousness around the same time in the 1960s. At the doctoral and postdoctoral level, female scientists are no longer underrepresented. At the faculty level, female scientists are still underrepresented, although the degree of female underrepresentation is substantially less than the degree of minority underrepresentation at this level.

Of course every career is a choice, a decision that everyone has to make for themselves. In some cases, minorities could be deciding that science is an unappealing job. What is of much greater concern are the cases of minorities who are not even considering the possibility of science as a career. This could be because they lack role models or lack encouragement from their school or family, scientists or scientific institutions. Another critical factor in the participation of the minorities in science is how successfully minorities who join the scientific community are retained and are able to achieve successful career progression. A fifth year graduate minority fellow, Cameron Bess states: “I was the first member of my family to obtain a Bachelors degree. I had little or no support going through the application process since no one in my family even knew the first thing about SATs and college applications. Now I will be the first member of my family to obtain a Ph.D., a fact I am extremely proud of. I still find it very difficult to explain to my family what a Ph.D. means and validate to them that it is not a career that is paved with gold. It can be very isolating, and with all the proud remarks, it can also be a lot of pressure.” Although there are a couple of NIH-funded programs that foster or encourage underrepresented young scientists at undergraduate degree level (such as the MARC/IMSD programs), few, if any, programs are in place to help the small number of minority graduate students to progress to the next step of faculty investigator.

The Rockefeller University does not have any mentoring scheme for minority students enrolled here, but efforts are being made at the recruitment level. Representatives of the Dean’s Office visit schools in Puerto Rico, and attend conferences—often accompanied by Rockefeller minority students—such as the Society for the Advancement of Native Americans and Chicanos in Science, and the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students. The Dean visits schools with large minority populations such as University of Maryland, Xavier (New Orleans), Howard, Spelman, and Morehouse.

Affirmative action programs can be used to try to redress some imbalances. However, by law, while it may be permissible to consider race as a factor in a selection procedure, any specific quota system is not allowed. A landmark case in affirmative action was the 1978 hearing of Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke. This concerned a medical school that was using two separate admissions tracks, one for minorities and one for non-minorities, with different selection criteria, such as grade requirements. A white student who had been rejected even though he had higher grades than some minority students who were admitted brought a case against the university arguing that he had been discriminated against on the grounds of his race, denying him his rights to equal protection under the law under the fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the quota system used was unconstitutional as it discriminated against non-minority applicants. They also ruled, however, that consideration of race by the university when making a decision was permissible. This meant that a university couldn’t set aside a fixed number of admission places for minorities only, as this would discriminate against non-minorities who would be ineligible for these places. But it was acceptable for universities to consider race as a “plus” factor as long as it was used in addition to many other criteria—student X has good grades, good references, etc., and also is a minority student and would have the overall educational advantage of increasing diversity amongst the student body.

In 2005, the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Fellowship issued a report on diversity and Ph.D.s². The study did note a general upward trend of minority representation in Ph.D.s—for example, between 1983 and 2003 the number of African Americans receiving life sciences Ph.D.s doubled and the number of Hispanics tripled. However, the authors noted that in comparison with business or government, doctoral programs have been considerably less successful in achieving a diverse workforce. The study raised many concerns about issues affecting the current situation of minority underrepresentation, including a noted decrease in funding of fellowships for minority students, absence of an effective national alliance of organizations devoted to minority issues in education, and little consensus or data on the most effective ways to improve the situation. This lack of research on the effectiveness of different minority programs was seen as a major obstacle to progress, as little data exists to help universities tailor the most effective minority recruitment possible.

While there is a general national upward trend in minority participation in science, and work being done to improve the situation, the most depressing statistics on underrepresentation are at the faculty level. This is of particular concern since faculty role models for minority students are an important part of the equation of inspiring minority students that they should remain in science and that they can pursue a scientific career to the highest levels of the profession. The faculty diversity at this university (see Table 3) is neither unique nor inspiring. A study from Yale of federally reported data revealed that in 2003 only 2% of tenured professors at Ivy League schools were African American, 1% were Hispanic, and that these numbers had stayed static for a decade. As the numbers of minority students increase, this should eventually lead to an increase in minority faculty. However, the current national levels of minority faculty have not reached the tipping point of normality yet. A striking example of the scale of the problem can be seen if you consider the prestigious Rockefeller University Friday lecture series, in which a noted professor of science from outside is invited here to speak about their research. In this lecture series, between January 2000 and December 2006, there were presentations by 147 scientists (US and foreign born) who were working at other American universities. Looking at the images and names of these scientists on their Web sites to guess their ethnicity, it appears that there were four presentations (2.7% of the total) by Hispanic scientists, and not a single presentation by an African American scientist.

In 1947, Marie Maynard Daly was the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Chemistry in the United States. She did her postdoctoral research at The Rockefeller University in the Mirsky laboratory and subsequently went on to a distinguished career at Columbia and Albert Einstein University. She offers a great example of what can be achieved when minorities have the opportunity to reach their potential as scientists. Without an active attempt to reach out to and foster underrepresented leaders, scientists, and educators, we will never truly be an academic institution—as the University motto tells us—that works for the benefit of all humanity.

References:

¹ http://factfinder.census.gov

² http://www.woodrow.org/responsivephd/RPHDresources.php