Part of the solution
Mellon Mays fellows earn continued support to fight racial disparity

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

It will be a great day for Roland Smith when a former Mellon Mays fellow joins the Rice faculty.

Until then, the coordinator of Rice University’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program truly enjoys the task at hand: encouraging students to help eradicate racial disparity in academia. With the support of more than $1.4 million in grant money over 17 years, Smith points with pride to a dozen former fellows with doctorates now working in higher education and 15 more graduate students pursuing Ph.D.s.

	ROLAND SMITH

All of them started as Rice undergraduates, and many had no thought that, someday, they could be standing in their professors’ shoes.

Smith, Rice’s associate provost, has had a couple of very good days recently. On one, he welcomed his first grandchild, Roland Smith IV, born earlier this month. On another, he got word of renewed commitment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which granted Rice $327,000 to support Mellon Mays for another four years.

Mellon Mays, the centerpiece of the foundation’s initiative to increase diversity among the ranks of faculty in the nation’s institutions of higher learning, supports thousands of students at 43 institutions through mentoring and financial incentives. It also works with a consortium of 39 historically black colleges and universities to guide students toward advanced degrees.

“It’s a huge commitment,” Smith said of the program that started in 1989. “Most foundations will have a hot-button issue, and then they’ll move onto something else. But Mellon felt this is one issue that needs more than a quick fix. It has to be long-term.”

He said Rice chooses five students a year to take part in the program, which provides mentors and access to resources to help them grow in the core arts and science disciplines targeted by Mellon Mays. Students are encouraged to apply as sophomores. They receive yearly stipends of $3,000 and are eligible to participate in summer fellowship programs, which can involve study abroad.

“It’s mentoring with a mission,” Smith said. He noted many participants come to Rice eyeing careers in engineering, medicine or law. “Becoming a Ph.D. and a faculty member is not on their radar because they haven’t been exposed to the possibility,” he said.

“Sometimes students have had to go back and renegotiate with their parents: ‘I really don’t want to be an engineer. This is what I want to do – I want to go into teaching and research.'”

The program is not limited to minorities. Smith, who took the reins from original director Edward Cox, an associate professor of history at Rice, said that “In the late 1990s, Rice opened the program up to all students who have a commitment to diversity.” Rice provides funds for some of the associate fellows and others are funded by the Mellon Foundation. All fellows participate in institution-based MMUF activities.

Smith keeps in touch with as many of the scores of former fellows as he can. One, Fay Yarbrough ’97, recently became the first to earn tenure, as an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, with the publication of her book, “Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Another, Michelle Nasser ’99, now an assistant professor of Spanish at Grinnell College, returned to Rice in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina wiped out all the work she’d done on her dissertation at Tulane. “We got her an office, a phone, a library card and a computer to use,” Smith recalled. “She said it actually allowed her to refocus her dissertation. She was just incredibly mature about the whole thing. And resilient.”

Yet another, Armanda Lewis ’98, became the national Mellon Mays associate director. “I’m still in academia, and I’m still in higher education, so for me it’s the pulling together of all of the things I love to do,” said Lewis, who earned her doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese from Columbia and works at the Mellon Foundation in New York. “I can see how valuable the foundation is, not only for me, but for the many lives it has touched.”

The program is accepting applications until Feb. 26 for the next fellows. Download the application here.