Increasing Minority Representation in the Mathematical Sciences: Good models but no will to scale up their impact

There are plenty of well-established misconceptions in the mathematical sciences, broadly speaking to include the applied and pure mathematics, statistics, computer science and the computational sciences communities across our nation, that are used to justify the problem of under-representation of US Latinos, Native Americans and African Americans in the mathematics professoriate. The most prevalent explanation puts the key as far away from the university communities as it can possibly be done. The problem of under-representation is unsolvable within our life time because of the shortcomings in the mathematics education that is provided at the K − 12 levels. “Until these issues are resolved there is nothing that we can do”. This self fulfilling prophecy ignores the history of cumulative successful efforts carried out by long-term university partnerships over the past two decades through funded projects like the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP). Programs like LSAMP, IGERT and VIGRE, funded by the National Science Foundation, have dramatically increased the pool of US students (minorities and non-minorities) with bachelors degrees in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields while providing significant resources for Ph.D. training for US students at the graduate level. In this essay, I discuss the framework that we have used to increase US minority representation in the mathematical sciences in the context of this pattern of misconceptions over the past decade. It is shown that changing the current landscape can be done over a relatively short time scale. This framework is presented as one model capable of altering the disgraceful diversity landscape in which the the mathematical sciences live. The model illustrates the obvious that is, that the current system of exclusion, regardless of the reasons and our past history, can be changed as long as it is treated as a true national priority. We live in a society that continuously reinvents itself in the presence of new challenges! So why can’t we find a systemic solution to the problem of inequity and under-representation in academia?