Minority Mentoring

During the past decade, NEA leadership and staff have focused on developing both intellectual and political ties with other higher education organizations. This joint statement, "Minority Mentoring," is one result of those ties.

In June 1990 the National Education Association and the American Association of University Professors jointly sponsored a conference on minority mentoring titled, "Increasing Minority Participation in Higher Education: The Faculty's Role." Fifty people from higher education institutions around the nation attended the event and discussed concrete ways to mentor minority students and faculty. Conference participants prepared a joint statement that was adopted by the NEA Executive Committee and the AAUP in the fall of 1990.

Mentoring to Increase Minority Participation In Higher Education--The Faculty's Role¹

The number of minority faculty and students in higher education is disproportionately low. This inadequate participation, particularly by African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and to some extent Asian Americans, continues despite increases in their rates of high school completion. We anticipate that absent significant intervention, minority participation in graduate schools and on faculties will decline even further.

Both the American Association of University Professors and the National Education Association have issued policy statements supporting programs to improve the participation of minority students, teachers, and faculty at all levels of education. As faculty organizations familiar with the impact of social policy on minority access and success in higher education, AAUP and NEA will continue to work for increased financial support and expanded social programs essential to assure genuine equality of opportunity for all citizens. Recruitment of minorities to colleges and universities is only the first step. Once minority students and faculty are on campus, hurdles continue to impede their chances for success. In many instances, the minority students' pre-college educational experience has not prepared them to live independently away from the home environment or to meet the challenges at the "majority institutions." There are too few minority faculty and staff to serve as role models, there is inadequate support for minority social and cultural life, and there are recurrent instances of racially motivated conflict and violence on campus. Minority faculty often face discrimination in salary, tenure and promotion decisions. Other generic circumstances which tend to marginalize education and, thereby, minimize student involvement in a culture of learning especially impact minority students. These include, excessive reliance on part-time faculty, part-time students, and large classes. Moreover, economically disadvantaged minority students are increasingly tracked into those community college and vocational programs that less often lead to baccalaureate and graduate education.

Faculty in any college or program have a responsibility to offer minority students and colleagues support, encouragement, and mentoring. Faculty should also recognize and seek to understand the various cultures of their students. Student attitudes often reflect their cultural backgrounds and faculty can more effectively teach students whose cultures they understand. In some instances, multi-cultural understanding may prompt revisions in courses and curricula so that previously ignored voices and perspectives may be explored. As higher education leaders, we will seek to increase faculty involvement in ensuring minority academic achievement particularly through individual attention and mentoring activities. The AAUP and the NEA will prepare jointly a resource list of examples of mentoring programs currently employed in higher education. In addition, we will distribute the list to our affiliates for use as models. Our respective organizations may also apply for grants to help fund mentoring programs.

The strategies outlined below focus on the immediate and direct contributions faculty themselves can make to increase minority participation and achievement through mentoring type activities. However, this should not diminish other efforts by the faculty, as well the administrations and governing boards, to increase minority participation.

1. Bridge Programs or Activities: Ensuring that minority students enter college requires early intervention and cooperation between elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities. Faculty can contribute to this cooperation through their national associations and/or at their campus.

Faculty can enhance minority access to more advanced education and scholarship by seeking out their colleagues in other segments of education (including schools, two and four-year colleges, and graduate programs) in order to identify students with the desire and potential to continue their education. For example, high school teachers may be invited to identify students with academic potential and introduce them to college teachers and students who will sponsor them through the undergraduate years and then assist them with finding a mentor in graduate school. Faculty should seek to form mentoring relationships with students or teachers that provide an opportunity for encouragement, counseling, academic guidance, and facilitation.

Faculty should work with their colleagues in preparatory programs, or draw them into collaborative work in more advanced programs, in order to assure suitable standards of preparation and to minimize unnecessary barriers to entry into four-year colleges.

2. Undergraduate Activities and Programs: Undergraduate mentoring must adapt to varied circumstances from the all-encompassing small college campuses where students may need opportunities for alternatives to the prevailing campus culture, to the part-time commuter program whose students experience college only as weekly, off-campus lectures.

In large and commuter institutions, where many minority undergraduates are enrolled, faculty need to offer a level of individual academic encouragement, guidance and support not normally found; faculty should promote office visits, facilitate and assist group study sessions, participate in discussion groups workshops or laboratories, involve students in their research, participate in summer study and research programs, and work with student organizations to design peer mentoring and group support networks.

In smaller group settings and classes, faculty should provide minority students the opportunity to pursue studies and activities which reflect and enhance the dialectic between the academic culture and their own.

Faculty should identify minority students with whom they can develop sustained academic relationships including directing these students to other faculty colleagues for support.

In institutions relying on formal programs to provide the advising, instructional services, extra-curricular academic culture, counseling and career opportunities offered by faculty members in the past, faculty should work to link these programs to their academic disciplines, to demonstrate a personal academic commitment, and to provide examples of benefits or opportunities accrued from academic experiences.

Faculty should encourage minority students to consider graduate work.

3. Graduate Activities and Programs: Mentoring relationships are most characteristic of and persistent in graduate programs. Special attention to the mentoring needs of minority students is required because of the inadequate numbers of minority faculty and the presence of a "prove yourself first" attitude which discourages many students.

Faculty should be alert to the needs of those minority students who are not assigned as research assistants to specific faculty and might, therefore, not receive the socialization and support generally provided research assistants.

All students need advisers who offer broad guidance and support through a mentoring relationship. Faculty should provide career guidance and support regardless of the student's background.

4. Collegial Mentoring Relationships: In these competitive times, all new faculty need encouragement and support. But minority colleagues in particular tend to be more isolated, more burdened with the service activities we advise other junior faculty colleagues to defer, and subject to recurrent discrimination and resentment. Therefore, we recommend the following:

Faculty should create opportunities to collaborate and/or pair with minority colleagues in curricular and scholarly endeavors that provide an opportunity for professional development.

Faculty should provide a climate for minority colleagues that offers an effective opportunity for full collegiality and a respect for individuality.

Senior faculty should insure that minority faculty receive the guidance and support generally available to other new faculty, including protection from excessive service and teaching requirements.

The strategies outlined above are general and are intended to suggest a much wider range of activities, beginning even in early childhood, that could contribute toward the goal of broader participation throughout higher education. Although the immediate goal of such enhanced mentoring activity is increased minority participation and achievement in higher education, as we move toward this goal we may contribute also to a general reinvigoration of academic life in which increased diversity and community are joined in scholarly achievement.

(1) This statement represents a consensus of participants at a meeting jointly sponsored by the American Association of University Professors and the National Education Association, June 1990 in Washington, DC.

Mentoring Program Resources