The Berkeley Edge includes the graduate minority support programs established by the Deans of the College of Engineering, the College of Chemistry, the Division of Physical Sciences, and the Division of Biological Sciences in the College of Letters & Sciences, with close coordination with Berkeley's SEM minority support programs at the undergraduate level. The Berkeley Edge includes all 16 strictly SEM departments on the UC Berkeley campus, and has ties to the life science departments of the interdisciplinary College of Natural Resources.

Berkeley awards the largest number of doctorates of any institution in the country. Berkeley also is one of the top institutions in conferring SEM doctorate degrees to underrepresented minorities. Across SEM fields, Berkeley prepares its graduate students for careers in academia and research, primarily. In so doing, Berkeley has a significant impact on the professoriate and the professional scientific research workforce. Berkeley's success in advancing its doctorate recipients into the ranks of the nation's faculty affords us both the opportunity and the responsibility to substantially increase the number of underrepresented minorities Berkeley graduates. Complicating matters now is the passage of anti-affirmative action laws, such as Proposition 209 in California, and court rulings such as Hopwood. These laws threaten to reduce the pool of graduating seniors in SEM in several states that award large numbers of bachelors degrees to Chicanos, Latinos and African Americans. By eliminating race-based targeting of fellowship opportunities, these laws also make it more difficult to attract and retain minority graduate students in some of the National Research Council's highest-ranking SEM graduate programs, including UC Berkeley.

Last year the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) noted, "The absence of a supportive environment and the need for minority students to deal with negative incidents is not new. But the shift away from supportive laws and policies sets a new tone. As institutions debate what practices are appropriate and/or legal, underrepresented minority students are continuing to disappear from the pool of entering S&E graduate students. The 21st century science and engineering workforce is being formed now. The prospect that the ethnic and racial composition of that workforce will resemble the diversity of the U.S. population continues to fade."

Countering the effects of these laws and addressing the long-standing "absence of a supportive environment" for minorities in the sciences and engineering requires new approaches. With explicit agreements to advance minorities through the educational pipeline, a realistic timeline, and adequate resources, we are convinced that we can sufficiently change departmental culture and practices in SEM and double the number of underrepresented minority students who enter and succeed in doctoral level studies.

Berkeley has a proud history of graduating relatively high numbers of minorities with doctorates in SEM. This history is a result of more than ten years of diversity program implementation and experimentation. The Berkeley Graduate Division is nationally recognized for its research and leadership in promoting diversity. The first of the discipline-specific programs was developed in Engineering in 1985. Soon after a program was developed in the Biological Sciences. In 1993 Berkeley established a graduate diversity program in the Physical Sciences. A diversity program in Chemistry is now being proposed. Each of these programs has experience, contacts, and infrastructure within its respective field.

Berkeley is in an ideal position to generate a new model for advancing minorities at the graduate level in SEM. The departmental and institutional cultural changes that support minority success in the sciences is achievable at UC Berkeley. The Berkeley Edge will enable the campus to build on our ongoing breakthroughs and innovations. The Berkeley Edge will facilitate the development of each of the SEM diversity programs into full-scale ventures in their scientific areas, their expansion into new activities, cross-fertilization of ideas, policies and practices across the SEM disciplines, and their uniform institutionalization. A MGE grant will enable Berkeley to institute new programs in the SEM disciplines, disseminate best practices and approaches consistently across the departments and colleges, formalize and institutionalize discipline-based graduate minority support programs and link efforts at the graduate and undergraduate levels. A MGE grant will also make it possible to initiate a meaningful collaboration between the largest producers of minority BA/BS recipients in SEM and the largest producer of Ph.D. recipients in SEM.

Last updated: 12 June 99