ABSTRACT
I recall quite vividly the start in the early 1990s of my interest in fostering diversity in higher education. Professor James Ware had just been appointed as the Academic Dean at Harvard School of Public Health and was letting go of some of his departmental responsibilities. He asked if I would take over as director of the department’s training grant in environmental statistics, funded through the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Being an ambitious young associate professor, I eagerly accepted. It wasn’t long before I had to start preparing the grant’s competitive renewal. These were the days when funding agencies were becoming increasingly proactive in terms of pushing Universities on the issue of diversity and one of the required sections in the renewal concerned minority recruitment and retention. Not knowing much about this, I went for advice to the associate dean for student affairs, a bright and articulate African American woman named Renee (not her true name). When I asked her what the School was doing to foster diversity, she chuckled and said “not much!” She suggested that I let her know when I was traveling to another city and she would arrange for me to visit some colleges with high minority enrollments so that I could engage with students and teachers to tell them about opportunities for training in biostatistics at Harvard.
