TAMPA, Florida — The Southern Regional Education Board and several partner organizations will hold the nation’s largest annual gathering of minority Ph.D. students and faculty mentors Oct. 23-26 at the Tampa Waterside Marriott.
The Compact for Faculty Diversity’s 15th Annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring will draw more than 1,000 doctoral students, faculty members and others in higher education for four days of networking, leadership training, professional development, job interviews and more. The event focuses national attention on the need to raise the number of minority faculty members across the South and the rest of the nation.
The event will feature nationally prominent speakers on higher education and faculty diversity, hundreds of workshops for aspiring and current college faculty members, networking and job interviewing opportunities for doctoral students, and much more.
The SREB-State Doctoral Scholars Program has provided assistance to more than 700 doctoral students since it began in 1993. Students must gain admission to doctoral programs on their own merit to be eligible for the highly successful program, whose graduates are now employed in academic settings in 36 states.
When the SREB program began, there were very few minority faculty members in the 16-state SREB region outside the region’s historically black colleges and universities. Today, about 5 percent of the professors at public four-year colleges in the United States are black, about 3 percent are Hispanic and less than 1 percent are American Indian — despite the fact that almost one-third of America’s college students are people of color.
To learn more about the minority faculty shortage nationally and in your state, and to connect with minority Ph.D.-level students, graduates and faculty members from your state, contact SREB Communications.
The Southern Regional Education Board, or SREB, based in Atlanta, was created in 1948 by Southern governors and legislatures to help leaders in education and government work cooperatively to advance education and improve the social and economic life of the region. SREB has 16 member states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. More information is available online at www.sreb.org.
