Filling the teaching void in business schools: from the boardroom to the classroom - where are the African American PH.D.s to train the next generation of Black business leaders?

Black Enterprise, August, 1996 by Vanessa Williams

From the boardroom to the classroom--where are the African American Ph.D.s to train the next generation of black business leaders?

GERRI HENDERSON HAD A DILEMMA: TAKE A job with a major corporation or go for a Ph.D. at a top business school.

For many in their 20s with six years of college behind them, the choice would have been easy. But Henderson waged a fierce tug-of-war with herself. Should she develop her mind and academic credentials or expand her bank account? She decided on a compromise. She would take a job at Kraft Foods in Chicago and defer enrollment in the Ph.D. program at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business.

In the end, it was mind over materialism. Shortly after taking the job, Henderson quit and enrolled at Kellogg to pursue her doctorate. She never made it back to the corporate world.

Today, she is an assistant professor of marketing at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina. Henderson, 32, likens the faculty members of the nation's business schools to a "fraternity," and the experience of getting a Ph.D. to pledging a sorority.

"I pledged Delta for seven-and-a-half weeks in the spring of 1983 and I pledged Ph.D. for four years. I can't find any better analogy. You are trying to enter into a fraternity; it's called academia, and there aren't many people in it. They pride themselves on their exclusivity and they don't want it to be easy."

As an African American, she belongs to an even more exclusive order: Out of more than 24,000 business school professors, only 2.7% are African Americans, according to the most recent annual survey of the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. At Fuqua, where Henderson joined the faculty last fall, there is only one other professor of African descent.

CLASSROOM DELUSIONS

While much attention has been focused on diversity in the boardrooms of the nation's top corporations, little concern has been given to diversity in the classrooms of the country's top business schools.

A 1995 Gallup poll of college seniors found that nearly one in five anticipated going to business school. With a 4% to 7% increase in salaries projected this year for M.B.A.s, business school was the first choice of postgraduate study among college seniors. Business school admissions may be on the rise but the number of black academicians in the system has risen only slightly over the past few years (see chart).

High tuition costs, grueling admissions exams, a lack of mentors and more tempting salaries in the private sector have deterred many blacks from pursuing business degrees. Also, many people mistakenly assume that an M.B.A. is a prerequisite for any candidate applying to a business doctoral program.

Today, however, efforts are under way to open more faculty doors for minorities. One of these efforts is the PhD Project, launched two years ago by the KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation in Montvale, New Jersey. The program seeks to lure African Americans away from careers in the corporate world to teaching posts in academia.

Last year, the PhD Project helped 24 African Americans enroll in doctoral programs. In the 1993-94 school year, of the more than 1,300 Ph.D.s awarded in business, only 38 went to African Americans, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Bernard Milano, executive director of the program, explains that the PhD Project "operates on the theory that more black business professors will yield more black students, which, in turn, will yield more black business professionals." He adds that academic research has shown the powerful influence faculty have on students and the disciplines they choose to major in.

Milano points out that black faculty can have positive effects on white students as well. "When you think of a class that is predominantly white and a faculty that's damn near all-white, the preparation of those students to work in a diverse workforce or with diverse customers and clients is really inadequate," he says. Corporate America, he adds, needs to significantly increase the supply of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. "Our customers are demanding it; our clients are demanding it."

Milano's sentiments are echoed by African American business school professors and students in explaining why they have chosen a campus career over a corporate one. While a joy of learning and a desire to pass along knowledge was the overriding motivation of all who have chosen to teach, some have been pleasantly surprised to find that the money is pretty good--teaching salaries range from $75,000 to $100,000. The quality of life is even better, given such perks as free or low-cost education for spouses and children, the ability to do research and liberal vacation policies.

CORPORATE FLIGHT

Henderson, who participated in the PhD Project's last two conferences, calls the program "fantastic." But, she notes, there was no comprehensive resource like the PhD Project when she began to pursue her teaching career.

After getting her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at Purdue University in 1986, Henderson went to work for IBM, but the desire to teach tempted her. In 1989, she was selected to take part in a two-week, in-house educational program at IBM taught by Harvard business professors.