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The Status of the African-American Physicist in the Department
of Energy National Laboratories
By Keith H. Jackson
 The
National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) has been concerned about the
small number of African-Americans with career scientific staff appointments
at Department of Energy funded national laboratories. NSBP has also been
frustrated with the overall lack of participation of Historically Black
Colleges and Universities (HBCU's) in DOE-funded scientific user facilities
such as high energy physics and nuclear facilities, Synchrotron Light
Sources, and the Spallation Neutron Source. As a result of these concerns,
the Technical Executive Officer of NSBP began to collect data, which were
placed before the American Physical Society Committee on Minorities (COM).
The American Physical Society Committee on Minorities formally took up
the issue but first wanted to verify the data provided by NSBP, and to
expand the study to include Hispanic physicists. COM enlisted and received
the full support of both the National Society of Black Physicists and
the National Society of Hispanic Physicists (NSHP).
Our data show that in general African American Ph.D. physicists
are less than 0.5% of the Ph.D. physicists employed at the DOE labs. African
Americans make up nearly 2% of the physics faculties across the United
States, including the faculties of HBCU's. Looking at data compiled by
Professor Donna Nelson at University of Oklahoma, we find that the percentage
of African-Americans on the faculties of the top 50 physics departments
in the U.S. is much smaller (N=60 or 0.6% of total).
What do these numbers mean and what is the connection between
the universities and the DOE- funded national laboratories? The DOE labs
are government-owned but contractor-operated (GOCO) and the contractor/operators
are universities that do not have a single African-American on their physics
faculties. The hiring practices and recruiting of the universities are
mirrored at the laboratories which they manage. The NSBP has several hypotheses
about the reasons:
•Many university faculty have joint appointments with
the national laboratories and serve on the scientific staff committees
responsible for hiring.
•Graduate students from the managing university, and
post-docs from established collaborators, have first shot at post-docs
and staff scientist positions. If you are not part of that informal network
there is precious little chance at getting any position at the laboratory.
•Many African-American physicists have a natural affinity
to the idea of teaching at an HBCU. While this is undoubtedly true, this
really leads to a self-fulfilling prophesy, that is in fact motivated
by hiring practices at other universities and the DOE labs. That is, academic
appointments at these institutions are more available to African-American
physicists since appointments in "top-50" departments and at the DOE labs
are not available.
•The bottom line is that the labs have not been inventive
and aggressive in recruiting domestic African-American and Hispanic-American
scientific talent. What more important mission could there be for an organization
that would claim to be a national laboratory?
Many of our colleagues would assert the "pool" or "external
availability" of American-Americans with Ph.D.'s in physics is small,
and that they know of no African-American with a Ph.D. in physics who
is unemployed. But there is, for example, a top-10 university that has
graduated over 34 African-Americans with Ph.D.'s in physics since 1974.
This university also manages a DOE-funded laboratory. There is not a single
African-American physicist on its physics or applied physics faculty.
This may not be surprising, but in addition there is not a single African-American
Ph.D.-level physicist on the staff of the national laboratory or on the
research staff of the university period! There is a common misconception
that African Americans somehow have an "affirmative action advantage"
when applying for jobs at the national laboratories. If that were true,
the statistics would be much better across the labs.
NSBP has some proposals for immediate action to address
the diversity problem at the national labs. The labs should become intimately
involved with the NSBP and the NSHP and other minority professional societies.
These organizations have annual meetings that consist of technical and
business sessions. At these meetings the labs will find serious scientists
with whom their scientific staff can form authentic collaborations, partnerships
and student exchanges. They will also find many students looking for research
opportunities and mentorship.
The national laboratories could also benefit from a site
visit by a team composed of members of NSBP, to review and give serious
advice on the recruitment, hiring practices, workplace environment, and
quality of scientific outreach activities of DOE labs. The members that
make up these professional organizations possess considerable scientific
expertise, and are well informed about science resources within minority
communities.
The national laboratories should aggressively seek out and
form research partnerships with faculty at HBCU's, Hispanic Serving Institutions
(HSI's) and Tribal Colleges. AIP statistics reveal that 44% of African
American students who earn a baccalaureate degree in the sciences do so
at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and most African- American
physics professors are at HBCU's. Research partnerships between research-intensive
institutions and HBCU's have historically paid great dividends in increasing
the number of minority Ph.D. physicists. Each DOE lab should have active
collaborations with HBCU's, HSI's and Tribal Colleges that include staff
exchanges, i.e., sending lab personnel to the schools as visiting professors,
and having professors at the labs as guest scientists, along with their
students as fellows. More importantly, national laboratories should pursue
joint appointments with HBCU researchers.
The national laboratories should ensure that minorities
participate on advisory committees and on annual divisional review committees
at all levels. This is particularly true of laboratory divisions that
operate publicly financed national user facilities. Diversity of the division
staff and facility users also should be a topic to be reviewed. It is
difficult to imagine how a review panel with no African-American scientists
will ever raise the issue of collaboration with minority scientists. The
guidelines of the review should state explicitly that the inclusion of
underrepresented minorities in the scientific program is on an equal footing
with the proposed science.
Diversity efforts at the national laboratories have to include
the actual stakeholders, the senior scientists with actual hiring and
program leadership responsibilities. Too often too much is left to the
lab diversity officer. In our survey and follow-up research we have found
that this is a fundamental disconnect at the national laboratories. Diversity
officers often are not scientists and have few informal contacts among
working scientists. We found that most of their job is to satisfy contractual
obligations which may protect the laboratories from lawsuits but do not
help to diversify the lab scientific workforce.
There is also a problem with senior lab personnel somehow
equating K-12 science outreach efforts with diversity efforts. The labs
will bring in high school children for a day of show and tell, but will
not invite serious scientists to serve on review panels and policy boards.
The idea is that exposure to science will somehow stimulate these students
to major in science when they enter college. However a student of color
might quickly come to the conclusion, seeing no people of color in scientific
leadership roles, that there are in fact no opportunities to take advantage
of and that science is not a viable career path. A student will see it
is not a pipeline issue but more of a spigot issue. The lab won't open
the spigot to hire a person of color.
The national laboratories need to be committed to programs
to improve the distribution of scientific knowledge and high-level scientific
and technical skills not only of professors and students from HBCU's,
HSI's or Tribal Colleges, but of all US students of science. In many instances
the hire of a foreign national in a scientific position at a laboratory
is justified on the basis of that foreign national possessing some "special"
skill. The national user facilities managed by DOE should play a leading
role in providing US citizens with the special skills necessary to compete
in the scientific workforce, for example a major investment in summer
schools and workshops to train US undergraduate and graduate students
in the science and technology embodied in major user facilities such as
the national ignition facility, supercomputing, synchrotron light sources,
neutron sources, and high energy physics and nuclear facilities. Why do
we invest public money in these facilities if we are not going to invest
an equal amount in training the next generation of US scientists and engineers
in their use?
An example of best practices is the DOE office of Nuclear
Engineering. Faced with the declining enrollment of US citizens in nuclear
engineering programs , the DOE Office of Nuclear Engineering, Science
and Technology moved some of its budget resources to support visiting
professorships at HBCU's. This was a quiet effort, and this office should
not be confused with the Office of Science, but it provides an example
of best practices and education programs appropriate to the DOE mission.
Finally, the Congress must exercise some oversight muscle
here. The fact is that the contractors, e.g., University of California,
University of Chicago, University of Tennessee, know that they are not
about to lose the contract over diversity, and in fact these are sole
source contracts which are not competitively bid in the first place. Given
the non-competitiveness of these contracts it is very hypothetical of
these institutions to talk about so called preferences in hiring of African
-Americans. The diversity of the core scientific staff and scientific
activity is not a major component of the management contracts. Congress
must make sure that diversity performance is strongly and explicitly put
into the management contracts, and oversee that performance as only Congress
can.
We are dealing with very small numbers that perhaps defy
rigorous statistical analysis and control grouping. The DOE laboratories
and the academic departments managed by the universities studied by NSBP
know what they are doing, or not doing. NSBP calls for congressional action
because we are frustrated by commissions, reports, diversity plans and
high-level statements. It is time to move directly to things we know will
yield results. The Congress ultimately has the oversight responsibility
for the national laboratories and we request Congress to turn its attention
to this national problem.
Keith H. Jackson, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, is President of the National Society of Black Physicists.
Copyright 2002, The American Physical Society.
The APS encourages the redistribution of the materials included in
this newsletter provided that attribution to the source is noted and the
materials are not truncated or changed.
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