As a young black college student, Harold Campbell said he did not have many role models to encourage him to continue his education after graduating from Ohio State University in 1972.
He waited almost a generation before seeking a master’s degree at California State University Hayward, near San Francisco, three years ago. In the interim he worked as a counselor and social worker to help put two children through college. A third is in high school.
Now, helped by a novel program to increase the number of women and minority faculty in the California State system, 45-year-old Campbell is in the second year of doctoral studies in educational administration at the University of California at Berkeley. His tuition and expenses are fully paid, and a future as a college professor awaits him.
“I think I can inspire people,” Campbell said from his home in Oakland. “There are very few black male faculty members. In my college career, I doubt if I saw three. It was something I never saw as a real possibility.”
Campbell is among more than 650 minority and female doctoral students who since 1987 have received up to $10,000 a year for three years in loans from CSU for studies at any institition. One-fifth of the loan is forgiven with each year the recipients teach at CSU after finishing their studies.
So far 90 recipients have earned doctorates and more than half have taught or are teaching at one of CSU’s 20 campuses.
The program is among an array of innovative efforts by universities and colleges to increase the number of women and minorities in doctoral programs and, in turn, in faculty positions to better reflect the nation’s ethnic and racial mix.
“For universities to improve their diversity, we have two choices: To go to the school next door and hire people away, which most universities do, or we can identify and develop our own candidates, and do it nationally,” said Peter Fascione, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit school in the San Francisco Bay area.
Two women lecturers at the school are undertaking doctoral studies, fully funded by Santa Clara, at universities in Ohio. In exchange, their loans-up to $18,000 a year, for three years-will be considered repaid in three years if they assume tenure-track teaching positions awaiting them at the university.
In Michigan, nearly 300 minority and women students receive up to $15,000 for master’s degrees or up to $25,000 for doctoral studies under the state’s Future Faculty Program. They can repay the loan within three years by teaching at public or private colleges or universities in the state, said Earl Nelson, director of the Office of Minority Equity of the state’s Department of Education.
Elsewhere in the Midwest, Big 10 schools and other universities exchange minority and female students in research positions and other postgraduate opportunities.
In Lafayette, Calif., the Minority and Women Doctoral Directory is the largest of several national services that provide schools with lists of thousands of qualified doctoral candidates and recent Ph.D. recipients.
Helped by intensive recruiting efforts, the number of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native American and other minority faculty members increased by nearly half between 1981 and 1991, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
But minority teachers at colleges and universities still comprise only 12 percent of total faculty members, as opposed to 20 percent of the population. Nearly half the nation’s minority faculty members are of Asian descent. Similarly, women, 51 percent of the population, have only 30 percent of the college-level teaching jobs.
Over the last decade, the number of doctorates earned by women increased by 25 percent, but only 5 percent were members of racial or ethnic minorities, according to figures compiled by the American Council on Education in Washington.
Overall, 933 doctorates were awarded to blacks in 1991, nearly 8 percent fewer than a decade ago. Hispanics earning doctorates rose by half to 708 but constituted only 3 percent of the nation’s total, though Hispanics represent 8 percent of the population.
“The problem is enormous: vast underrepresentation of minorities in faculty ranks, insufficient numbers of minority Ph.D. recipients planning academic careers, too few minority students in the pipeline for graduate degrees and not enough minority undergraduates ready to enter graduate programs,” said a report by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a group based in Boulder, Colo.
Like other students, many minorities burdened by debt from loans for undergraduate college opt either for private industry or professions such as medicine and law to repay them more quickly.
In addition, experts say, the culture of most college faculties, until recently mainly white male preserves, has not seemed an attractive choice for many students from less-privileged backgrounds.
“Often minority students and women have had a difficult time establishing the types of relationships with faculty members that they need to progress in academic careers,” said DeWayne Matthews of the Boulder-based commission.
As a Mexican-American undergraduate at UCLA in the 1960s, said Stanford University history professor Albert Camarillo, “If you would have told me someday I’d become a history professor, I would have laughed and told you you were crazy.”
But two faculty members saw potential in Camarillo and encouraged him toward an academic career. Now he hopes to return the favor through a mentoring program at Stanford that identifies prospective women and minority faculty members as early as their sophomore year and defrays up to $10,000 of their undergraduate student loans.
The University of Wisconsin system has launched a mentoring program in which senior faculty members guide junior female teachers in the system, said Marian Swoboda, the university’s equal employment opportunity compliance officer.
Karen Strother, 29, is the type of faculty member that universities want to lure to their campuses. A lecturer at Santa Clara University for two years, she was the first minority chosen for the school’s program to fund the doctoral studies of future professors.
“I hear universities saying it’s so difficult to find women of color or minorities (for faculty jobs). I’ve heard it so often, you start to believe it,” said Strother, an African-American working toward her Ph.D. in communications studies at Ohio University in Athens. “But it’s not a problem of finding people. It’s a problem of preparing them for it.”
Both Strother and Campbell believe that as university professors they will have something special to offer white students as well as minorities.
“At 18 or 19, you can have more opportunities in front of you than you’ve figured out,” said Campbell, whose return to school has inspired his own children. “You’ve got enough opportunities in front of you that you shouldn’t let the things that frustrate you deter you. . . . My goal is to inspire people to keep going and keep trying, despite how bad things may look.”
