The Chemistry Diversity Initiative at Purdue ... - ACS Publications

Chapter 5

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The Chemistry Diversity Initiative at Purdue University Jean Chmielewski,* Colby M. Adolph, Stella K. Betancourt, Reena Blade, and Christopher J. Pulliam Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, 560 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, United States *E-mail: [email protected]

The Chemistry Department of Purdue University has a rich and successful history of diversity with both our graduate students and our faculty. We have been recognized for the strong participation of underrepresented minorities in our graduate student program. We also have been a leader in the country for representation of women in our faculty. Herein we present some of the historical underpinnings of these successes, our current state of diversity, and how we can move forward for even more effective inclusiveness in the future.

Introduction The Purdue University Chemistry Department has a strong commitment to improving the diversity of its students, staff and faculty (1). We believe that an increasingly diverse department will significantly improve the success of our students in the workforce and in global communities. We continue to strive to create a climate that is inclusive and welcoming to all, regardless of rank or position. Sustaining such an environment is challenging at times, as it is easy to lose sight of the issues with the many other demands of academia. We believe, however, that scientific preeminence and a rich culture of diversity are inexorably linked. The achievements of Purdue’s Chemistry Department in diversity that we document herein are encouraging, but they also serve to highlight areas of urgent priority for transforming the culture of diversity for our current and future students and faculty.

© 2017 American Chemical Society Nelson and Cheng; Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 2: Perspectives and Exemplary Programs ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Gender Diversity – Women Graduate Students and Faculty in Chemistry at Purdue The first woman received her Ph.D. in Chemistry at Purdue in 1935. Alison Watson Kramer (Figure 1) was one woman in an entering Chemistry class of 55 men in 1930. In her words, “Around the University of New Hampshire I was known as ‘Engineering Alice’. That didn’t last long as I switched to Biochemistry for my masters. Then at Purdue I found myself the only girl assistant in Chemistry among 55 gentlemen.” In the next 10 years, two more women completed their Ph.D. degrees: Elizabeth Riley in 1941 and Edna Berry in 1946. Since these beginnings, the number of female students in our Chemistry graduate program has continued to grow. From 1985-1989 women made up 35% of our entering graduate student classes, rising to 37% during the nineties. For the past 16 years over 40% of our graduate student population in Chemistry was composed of women. In 2001 Chemical & Engineering News reported that from 1994-1998, 77 women obtained Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry in our department, the highest number of female graduates in any university in the country during that time (2). However, those women represented only 29% of those obtaining Ph.D. degrees overall from our department. From 2000-2014, 212 women earned Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry at Purdue, with an increase up to 39% of the overall number of graduates. From the period of 2004-2014, the national average for women earning Ph.D. degrees was 38% for comparison (3). So although we have made great strides in the recruitment and retention of female graduate students we still have a ways to go to achieve a full female-male gender balance in our program. The growth of women in our faculty ranks in Chemistry at Purdue has been a much more recent process. Professor Minou Bina (Figure 2) joined the Chemistry faculty in 1979 and was a strong proponent for the hiring of additional women on the faculty. Professor Bina commented, “After my arrival to Purdue University, at the first departmental faculty meeting, I was startled to find that I was the only woman in that room. Nonetheless, I felt very much at home and began to make many friends with whom I shared my research interests and learned about theirs. Particularly, very early on, Professor Harry Morrison took me under his wings and became my special and much cherished mentor. When he became the head of our department, he met with every faculty member and asked about possible concerns. I did not hesitate to indicate my concern about a general lack of female faculty in our department. After some brainstorming and a few meetings, he realized that it was important to have a woman to serve on the faculty recruitment committee.” With a small but significant influx of three new female assistant professors from 1989 to 1990, the department was then able to have a woman on each of its faculty hiring committees. This surely placed a burden on these few women, but their efforts, in addition to increased awareness overall by the faculty, paid dividends. Ten years later the number of women on our Chemistry faculty had more than doubled to 7, placing us third in the top 50 universities in the U.S., with four full professors in our ranks (4). Ten years further on, in 2010, we saw an additional doubling to 15 women on the faculty in Chemistry, placing us first in absolute numbers for female faculty at the top 50 U.S. universities (5). Retention of these 60 Nelson and Cheng; Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 2: Perspectives and Exemplary Programs ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


outstanding faculty is a constant struggle as highly successful women are always in demand in other Chemistry departments around the world. We have managed to keep pace with our faculty hiring: six out of our last 14 hires have been women. Today a third of our faculty are women, up from about 2% in 1980. There is at least one woman in each of our sub-disciplines in Purdue’s Chemistry department and women at each stage of the faculty ladder, including 3 distinguished professors.

Figure 1. Dr. Alice Watson Kramer, the first woman graduate student in Chemistry at Purdue University, obtained her Ph.D. in 1935.

61 Nelson and Cheng; Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 2: Perspectives and Exemplary Programs ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Figure 2. Professor Minou Bina was the first research-active woman faculty member in the Chemistry Department of Purdue University, joining as an assistant professor in 1979.

Racial/Ethnic Diversity – Graduate Students and Faculty in Chemistry at Purdue Purdue’s Chemistry Department has had a rich tradition of having underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students as an integral part of our program. The first African American student obtained his Ph.D. from our department in 1967. William Earl Moore (Figure 3) came to Purdue from Southern University in 1963. Dr. Moore commented, “in 1963, my undergraduate department head, Professor Vandon E. White, was very familiar with the Chemistry Department at Purdue. He had earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry four years earlier from the School of Agriculture, but took several courses in the Chemistry Department. When I informed Professor White that I had received two assistantship offers from Big Ten universities, Professor White called the chair of Chemistry (Professor Earl McBee), and the result was that I received an offer over the phone from Purdue. When I informed my undergraduate counterparts of the offer, one stated that Purdue was considered ‘The MIT of the Midwest’. Another said that in basketball games, ‘the Purdue players studied chemistry during halftime’. Although the anecdotal observations were somewhat humorous, they nonetheless contained an element of substance which solidified my decision to come to West Lafayette. Fifty-three years later this remains an unequivocal, non-regrettable choice”. Over the next few years more African American men entered our program, with Seymour Gray earning a Ph.D. degree in 1968, followed by Frank Brown 62 Nelson and Cheng; Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 2: Perspectives and Exemplary Programs ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


in 1969 and Prentice Hull in 1970 (Figure 3). Dr. Brown told us: “I hitch hiked to campus (27 miles one way) on a daily basis when I was a second year undergraduate at Southern University. One of the cars that regularly stopped to give me a ride was a young white man who was employed in Baton Rouge by an oil refinery. He told me that he went to Purdue and that when he graduated he had HIS choice of jobs. This conversation was a defining moment for me because I needed a good job in order to provide for my family.” After Purdue, Dr. Brown went on to a highly successful career as a scientist at Eli Lilly and Company. Following his retirement, he generously established the Frank Brown Distinguished Professorship in Chemistry at Purdue. Between 1970 and 1999, an additional eleven African American men and women obtained their Ph.D. degree at Purdue. In 1973 the first Hispanic student, Osvaldo Rodriguez (Figure 3), received his Ph.D in Chemistry at Purdue. Later, in 1986, a trio of women were the next Hispanic graduate students to obtain a Ph.D.: Marisol Vera, Lourdes de Cárdenas and Ileana Isern-Flecha (Figure 3). From 1989 to 1999, four additional Hispanic men and women graduate students were awarded Ph.D. degrees. More recently, from 2000-2015, 85 URM graduate students obtained their Ph.D. from our department. Purdue ranked 2nd of the top 50 Ph.D. granting Chemistry Departments in the U.S. for the percentage of URMs in our graduate student body (17%) from 2005-2009 (6). Additionally we were ranked 1st in growth of the number of URM students in our program from 1995-2009 (6). We are proud to have over 100 URM Chemistry Ph.D. alumnae as a part of our academic community at Purdue. With these successes, however, we have more recently been faced with the challenge of a precipitous drop in the number of URM students in our entering graduate classes. From 1996-2008 we averaged about 9 URM graduate students per year, but from 2009-2015 this number had decreased by 60%. We are currently studying the reasons for this serious decline in URM students in our program. To address these alarming trends, however, we have instituted a multi-pronged approach for the recruitment and retention of graduate students from URM groups in the Chemistry Department. Our plan – the Chemistry Diversity Initiative - has 3 phases focused on attracting applicants from targeted universities, mentoring students through the acceptance process and a mentoring plan designed for the successful matriculation and professional development of these students through our graduate program. Our current URM graduate students have joined forces with the faculty and are now leading the charge in recruiting at Historically Black Insitutions and Hispanic-serving Institutions. An external advisory board composed of our highly successful former URM Ph.D. students from the Chemistry Department has been created to provide a professional network of advisors for our graduate students and faculty. We are closely monitoring the success of these initiatives, which have been supported by a Diversity Transformation Award from Purdue University. We are pleased to report that the 2016 entering graduate student class to the Chemistry Department at Purdue has 13 URM students – over 20% of our entering class, a significant increase from 2006-2015 when only about 7% of our entering classes was composed of URM students. 63 Nelson and Cheng; Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 2: Perspectives and Exemplary Programs ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Figure 3. Dr. William Moore (top left), Professor Emeritus from Southern University, was the first African American graduate student in our department who obtained his Ph.D. in 1967, followed by Drs. Seymour Grey (top center) and Frank Brown (top right). Drs. Osvaldo Rodriguez (bottom left), Marisol Vera, Lourdes de Cárdenas and Ileana Isern-Flecha (bottom left center to right) were the first Hispanic students to obtain Ph.D. degrees. The situation with URM faculty in the Chemistry Department at Purdue is still an area that needs significant attention. As is seen in many other universities in the U.S., the percentage of our faculty that are from underrepresented groups is quite low. In a 2000 report on the status of minorities in the top 50 Chemistry Departments (7), URMs made up only 2.6% of the faculty and about a half of the departments had no URM faculty at all; Purdue at this time had two URM faculty members. In a more recent survey from 2013-2014 (8), the overall URM faculty level stood at 4%. Disturbingly, 20% of the departments polled still had no URM representation on their faculty; Purdue’s Chemistry Department had three URM faculty – only 7% of our total faculty. Just as the retention of outstanding women faculty is a challenge, the situation is even more acute with URM faculty. We must be continuously vigilant in finding windows of opportunity to attract outstanding URM faculty candidates to our department. In the past two years we have been very fortunate to bring two exceptional URM faculty into our ranks.

Conclusions Increasing the diversity of a Chemistry Department is highly challenging. Some of our best strategies, such as bringing in women faculty at the assistant professor level, can fail when these outstanding women are recruited away after obtaining tenure. A strategy proposed by Minou Bina back in the late eighties – making dual offers to highly qualified applicants who were partners: 64 Nelson and Cheng; Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 2: Perspectives and Exemplary Programs ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


a “two-body” opportunity for the department - has been more successful. Most significantly a lack of attention to the issues of diversifying the student and faculty population can lead to losses in what were previously highly successful efforts, as we saw recently with our URM Chemistry graduate students. At Purdue we have in place a standing diversity implementation committee that has adopted a plan for broadening participation in Chemistry (1). Herein we have focused on our efforts with graduate students and faculty. Our plan seeks inclusivity for staff and undergraduates as well. We have focused on gender balance for women specifically here, but we need to be mindful of the increasing population of LGBTQ students, staff and faculty in our department. We have also focused on our successes with African American and Hispanic students, but acknowledge that we have very few Native Americans and Pacific Islanders among our students and faculty. To become complacent because of some success in some areas is easy to do. It takes the attention of more than one person in a department – or even the creative will of an entire department to successfully and continually move forward for even more effective inclusiveness. The American Chemical Society should play a crucial role in lobbying for major reforms in the distribution of funding for public schools to as to improve the pipeline of URM students entering STEM disciplines. Only through a more democratic public educational system will we see true gains in URM representation in departments like ours at Purdue in the future.

Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Dr. Dwight Lewis, Dr. Bob Wild and Dr. Dave Zwicky for providing much of the data reported herein, and Professor Harry Morrison for chairing the departmental diversity committee that initially drafted the plan for broadening participation (1). We also acknowledge Purdue University for a 2016 Diversity Transformation Award to support our efforts with the Chemistry Diversity Initiative: A Graduate Student Program for Success. JC acknowledges NSF for support of the broader impacts of 1609406-CHE.

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The Chemistry Diversity Initiative at Purdue ... - ACS Publications

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