Challenges for Black Colleges’ Brightest in the Lab - New York Times: ... Yet such colleges, even decades after segregation fell, continue to award a disproportionate share of the bachelor’s degrees that black students receive nationwide. And going back to the Jim Crow era, when the South’s major universities barred black students, there was a pipeline carrying many of the most ambitious across the Mason-Dixon line for graduate study, especially at the Midwestern state universities of the Big Ten.
Adam W. Herbert knew of that legacy as the son and nephew of alumni of two historically black colleges, Langston in Oklahoma and Southern in Louisiana.
When he became president of Indiana University four years ago, the first black to hold that position, he set about trying to revive the tradition with a particular eye on science, technology, engineering and math, fields in which black students are woefully underrepresented.
A result of Dr. Herbert’s efforts, an initiative known by the acronym STEM for its four areas of concentration, started last month with the arrival of five students at Indiana-Purdue in Indianapolis and four at Indiana’s main campus in Bloomington. While the students receive research experience, the two universities get an inside track on recruiting talented blacks for graduate school.
