Historically Black colleges and universities in the U.S. have had outsize success in launching Black students into physics, but declining enrollments and tight funding are threatening their ability to do so. TheMissingPhysicists
Historically Black colleges and universities in the United States have had outsize success in launching Black students into physics. Although only 9% of all Black undergraduates attend the country’s 100 HBCUs, those schools for decades have awarded the majority of physics degrees earned by Black students.
That shifting balance would matter less if the physics departments at the nation’s research heavyweights—all PWIs—were doing a better job of deploying their large research budgets and hefty endowments to fill the pipeline with Black physicists. But even those with the best records are falling far short of what’s needed to improve diversity.
“Bob Dixon has probably trained more African American physics undergraduates than anyone else in the country,” says Warren Buck, a Black physicist and former chancellor of the University of Washington , Bothell. “He’s underrated because he doesn’t look for glory. But he’s very effective,” adds Buck, a former chair of the physics department at Hampton University, an HBCU in Virginia.
Nicholas Fuller was one of them. Raised in Trinidad and Tobago by a single mother who regarded a good education “as the only path to success,” Fuller excelled at science in high school. When it was time to go to college, he chose Morehouse because it offered him a full scholarship. Dixon’s approach to training the next generation of physicists also resonated with him.
Dixon used the money to create the Center for Excellence in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics at Morehouse. CESEM provided full scholarships and intensive academic and career guidance to 50 Morehouse freshmen seeking an undergraduate degree in the natural sciences, math, and engineering, including 17 in physics. Some 85% had earned degrees by the end of the grant, and upward of 80% chose to continue to a graduate science, technology, engineering, or math program.
Without the scholarships and paid internships, students drifted into other fields. Over the next 2 years, Morehouse’s annual production of Black physics majors plunged from six, a number that had sustained its top ranking, to zero. In 2004, after 16 years as department head, Dixon threw in the towel and took a job at Grambling State University, a Louisiana HBCU. “It was very disappointing that the college didn’t give us a chance to continue what we were doing,” he says.
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