Filling the Racial Gap in Academia: "One definition of insanity, someone once said, is to keep doing the same thing in the same way and expect different results. Here's another: Believing that a diagnosis and treatment that worked for a patient in one set of circumstances will work in all circumstances.
I am of an age to remember when the underrepresentation of black Americans in the nation's elite universities was very much a matter of racial discrimination. The prescription that followed from that diagnosis -- whether at Harvard or at Ole Miss -- was to work at eliminating discrimination. And, to an astounding degree, it worked.
And yet a report released last week by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation reveals that while the numbers have been improving with regard to university enrollment, still a small fraction of the doctoral degrees granted by those universities go to blacks or Hispanics -- about 7 percent in 2003. And most of that tiny number is awarded in a small range of disciplines, such as education. Almost certainly, someone will propose an attack on this new problem with the same diagnosis and prescription that worked for the old one."
