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University of Washington Symposium Gives Voice to Successes, Passions, and Frustrations
October 27-28, 2006
Sharing successes—while still acknowledging the daunting challenges ahead—was a focus of the third Diversity in the Sciences symposium, held at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. The meeting gave teams from 40 participating colleges and universities the chance to address the myriad issues involved in achieving diversity in the sciences. Students shared their passion for science, faculty brainstormed ways to recruit and retain underrepresented minority (URM) students in science majors, and administrators discussed methods to adapt the system to help their faculty and students. At the end of the conference, teams from each institution reassembled to apply the day's shared lessons to their own action plans.
The symposium offered evidence that change can come quickly when college or university faculty and administrators make a commitment to increase opportunities for URM students on campus. Take Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, for example, said Wendy Raymond, symposia co-director. In September 2006, the university introduced a Biology Scholars Program—modeled after a similar program at the University of California, Berkeley—less than a year after its diversity team had heard the program's successes described at an earlier symposium.
The Cornell experience showed that hard work from team members and commitment from the campus can bring about immediate change. Bonnie Comella, Cornell's director of undergraduate advising in biology, explained that although her campus's undergraduate biology program had been talking about diversity issues for many years, it wasn't until a team participated in the November 2005 Harvard symposium that major changes started to occur in Cornell's biology program.
First, as part of the requirement for participation in the symposium, administrators took an inventory of the number of URM biology majors—which showed that Cornell was not retaining URMs in biology at a rate comparable to the retention rate for majority students. Second, the symposium's sessions showed the team that many perceived obstacles were not true barriers. Finally, the experience pushed team members to ask their own students what they needed to succeed at Cornell.
"I've been here 13 years, and I had no idea about the lack of support from their peers and sometimes even their families that these students face to go down this path to a science degree," said Comella. "We couldn't wait for the money to come in. We had to ask ourselves, 'What can we afford to do this fall?'"
Cornell students quickly felt the positive effects of the new program, which began with 22 students and hopes to add 25 scholars each year. Raymond noted that a Cornell University faculty member had recently overheard two students conversing about molecular biology details. One student asked, "How do you know so much?" The other proudly replied, "Well, I'm a Biology Scholar!"
In addition to sharing Cornell's good news, Raymond, HHMI undergraduate program director at Williams College, also discussed some of the preliminary data derived from the first symposium at Harvard—a stark reminder of the challenges that symposia participants still face.
Data collected from the 37 institutions that participated in the 2005 Harvard symposium showed that about 30 percent of all students—independent of race, ethnicity, gender, or economic status—enter college with an interest in science, she reported. However, after completing a second biology course, URM students leave the biology major at a higher rate than other students do. Only about three-fourths of the African American and Latino students continue on to a third course. As a group, these students achieve only 80-85 percent of their institution's average grade—regardless of what the average grade is at each college or university—in the first introductory biology course. The data have not yet been analyzed, but many URM students, talking informally during the symposium's sessions, said they believe that many students leave science majors because they find the courses too hard and too time-consuming.
Symposia co-director Robert Lue, who was already involved in diversity programs at Harvard University, said the symposia series inspired him to do even more to persuade and attract his colleagues to work with him. "When transforming your institution, don't aspire to be the lone voice forever! Nucleate a group of colleagues to join you in the good fight," Lue advised. The director of life sciences education and HHMI undergraduate program director at Harvard, Lue noted that the act of doing science is intimately connected to the scientist's perspective.
"[It] is not simply a nice thing to have science be representative of society," he said. "It is about making sure we don't lose those insights that come from that range of experiences and backgrounds."
Participating in the symposia also reassured Cornell's Comella that her own background did not have to be a barrier to her taking the lead in a diversity program at her university. "Having those informal conversations and hearing from people like Wendy Raymond helped me realize that I can do this. I can be a [white] woman and run this program well."
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