AAC&U News | April 02

Hope College/Howard University Collaboration Develops Quality Teaching and Campus Diversity

Jillian McLeod, Ph.D., is one of only a handful of African American women mathematicians to receive doctorates in this country last year. There are 3,500 college mathematics departments in the United States—all looking for qualified math professors. So the odds were against finding this highly marketable professor from Trinidad teaching in a small-town, church-sponsored, liberal arts college in the midwest. However, Dr. Mcleod, who received her doctorate from Howard University, is indeed assistant professor of mathematics at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

A participant in the Howard University/Hope College Partnership, a component of AAC&U's Preparing Future Faculty Program (PFF), Dr. McLeod is in her second year at Hope. Although she has accepted an offer to teach at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts this coming fall, she emphasizes that at Hope she found a very hospitable and supportive environment. Before graduating from Howard, the partnership provided her a teaching fellowship at Hope that included housing, office space, and mentor-advisors to guide her through her dissertation process and her first year of teaching. "At Hope you have to be both a teacher and a researcher," she says. When asked how she viewed this partnership and the PFF program overall, she expressed that through this experience, she was a more attractive candidate for her subsequent job search. "This experience elevated me so that, out of nine nationwide interviews—which is an atypical number—I received eight job offers" she says.

One of the key goals of the Howard/Hope Partnership is "to enhance racial and cultural understanding between a predominantly black and a predominantly white institution." Through this partnership, African American doctoral candidates from Howard University are placed as teaching fellows at Hope College with the intent of not only diversifying the faculty of the school, but nurturing their professional growth as instructors and researchers as they complete their dissertation and last phases toward their doctorate. "If we can make this happen at Hope, we can make it happen anywhere," says Alfredo Gonzales, Associate Provost at Hope College.

The Hope/Howard partnership developed from a casual conversation between Mr. Gonzales and Dr. Orlando Taylor, dean of Howard University's Graduate School, when Dr. Taylor attended a communications symposium on the Hope College campus. Asked how Hope College came to be the collaborator with Howard University in this groundbreaking program, Dr. Taylor replied, "We knew of the serious commitment at Hope to enhance diversity on its campus." He also said that Hope provided a "sufficiently different" environment from that of Howard. It offered the opportunity for Howard graduate students to experience life as a teacher at a small, liberal arts college.

According to Dr. Taylor, traditional doctoral studies place a heavy value on research and tend to undervalue the other qualities required to enter the professoriate. "We wanted to expose and develop unique competencies," says Dr. Taylor. At Hope College the teaching fellows are "submerged" into teaching from the start. Each fellow has an advisor or teaching mentor, as well as an advisor for the continuation of their studies toward their doctorate.

In addition to an expressed interest in pursuing a career in higher education, a PFF Fellow must hold a master's degree or have earned 30 credits toward their doctoral degree, have a minimum 3.5 grade point average, and be nominated by their department to be eligible to participate in this program.

Overall, there are more internship possibilities than there are student applicants in the program, most of whom are humanities and social science majors. One of the challenges to the program is finding graduate students in the physical sciences and biology who are willing to leave the Howard campus and their mentors and continue their research elsewhere.

A nationwide initiative to encourage research universities to partner in clusters with other kinds of institutions to strengthen preparation of graduate students for future careers in the professoriate, the Preparing Future Faculty Program was established by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council of Graduate Schools in 1994. Howard University Graduate School not only participated in launching the initial PFF Program, but also conceived the Howard University/Hope College PFF Partnership.

For more information on the partnership, visit www.hope.edu.

For more information on the Howard University Preparing Future Faculty Program, visit www.founders.howard.edu/gsas/pff/default.htm.

For more information on AAC&U's Preparing Future Faculty Program, visit www.aacu.org/pff/index.cfm.