UM Earns National Honor for Diversity in Graduate Education

12/05/2003

OXFORD, Miss. - The University of Mississippi has won a prestigious national honor in recognition of its efforts to recruit and retain talented minority students in graduate programs.

The Council of Graduate Schools awarded the university its CGS/Peterson's Award for Promoting an Inclusive Graduate Community during the group's annual conference this week in San Francisco. The $10,000 award recognizes "creative approaches that enhance current recruitment practices and that can serve as models for other institutions."

The award honors both the university's track record of attracting and graduating minority graduate students and its plans to enhance campus experiences for graduate students of all cultures and ages, said Maurice Eftink, associate provost and dean of the UM Graduate School.

"Essentially, this award is a way to recognize universities that are doing a good job of promoting diversity in graduate education," Eftink said. "This award should go a long way to dispel notions about the university. It says we've made a lot of progress toward diversity across our campus and it says we have a support network for students of all races, all ages and from all countries."

The Council of Graduate Schools represents universities with comprehensive graduate programs across the United States and Canada. Recent winners of the CGS/Peterson's Award include the University of Georgia, the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

For help in preparing this year's proposal, Eftink asked representatives from the Graduate Student Council for ideas. The team proposed several programs and activities designed to bring graduate students of varied cultures and backgrounds together to share and learn from one another.

"The students came up with some excellent ideas and wrote most of the proposal themselves," Eftink said. "In fact, the reason our proposal rose to the top is because it incorporates so much of that student point-of-view."

The group's proposals include a writing assistance program that pairs English majors with international students who need help writing papers, proposals and theses; an annual social and cultural activity that showcases artists, writers, researchers and musicians from throughout the UM graduate community; the appointment of Graduate Ambassadors to help recruit students and ease their transitions to campus life; and a series of luncheon discussions to bring together people of all races, ages and backgrounds.

The Graduate School will match the $10,000 award to help implement the programs, Eftink said.

The student group "brainstormed for weeks" to develop the proposal, said Stephen Monroe, a doctoral student in English from Chattanooga, Tenn. Monroe, president of the English Graduate Student Body, was charged with compiling the group's ideas into the final proposal.

"We had so many good ideas that it was a real challenge to cut it down to the allowable size for the proposals," Monroe said. "I think the breadth of programs we came up with is one of the real strengths of our proposal."

Monroe accompanied Eftink to San Francisco to accept the award, along with John Bowling, a pharmacognosy major from Collierville, Tenn., and president of the Graduate Student Council; Michael D. Smith, a biology major from Greenwood and president of the Black Graduate and Professional Student Association; and Carla Cotwright, a math major from Los Angeles.

"I'm really looking forward to implementing these programs," Monroe said. "It's going to be fun to take these ideas and put them to work and see what we can accomplish over the next couple of years."

by Mitchell Diggs