ETSU was front and center when more than 1,000 minority doctoral students and Ph.D. graduates gathered recently for the nation’s largest conference to address the shortage of racial/ethnic minority faculty on college campuses.
Dr. Cerrone Foster, a postdoctoral fellow in physiology at ETSU, was honored as one of many minority Ph.D. graduates in the past academic year at the awards ceremony at the Compact for Faculty Diversity’s 14th annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring. The event, which is sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board and several partner organizations, featured nationally prominent speakers and several days of workshops for aspiring and current college faculty members. Attending as a Compact faculty mentor was Dr. Angela Lewis, who is department chair of family and consumer sciences at ETSU.
Mark Musick, ETSU’s Quillen Chair of Excellence in Education and president emeritus of the Southern Regional Education Board, congratulated Foster and the graduates of 2007 at the conference. Musick recognized the seriousness of the national shortage of minority college faculty more than a decade ago. He initiated the formation of the SREB-State Doctoral Scholars Program in 1993 to support and encourage more minority Ph.D. candidates to enter academia.
Today about 15 percent of full-time faculty are minorities. Only three Ph.D.s in mathematics were awarded to African-American students in the South the year that the program began.
Today, SREB’s doctoral scholars program alone has served more than 700 scholars. More than 75 percent of the program’s graduates are now employed on college and university campuses.
In recognition of his contributions, the SREB Board renamed the scholars the Mark Musick Doctoral Scholars in his honor. For more information visit www.sreb.org.

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