Framingham State, Worcester State granted $2.9M to recruit faculty of color

Photo | Courtesy of Framingham State University Reema Zeineldin, associate vice president for academic affairs at Framingham State University

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By Laura Finaldi

Two Central Massachusetts colleges will receive grant funding to support recruitment for early career faculty members of color.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $2.9 million to Framingham State University, Worcester State University, and Bridgewater State University to create a national model to recruit, retain, and promote cohorts of faculty of color in the STEM fields.

Framingham State is the lead institution on the effort, which begins July 1 and will take place over five years, according to a press release from the college. The grant will support the hiring of a full-time grant manager to be shared by the three institutions with the goal of sharing the model with other university systems across the country.

Strategies will include planning a cluster hiring of STEM faculty of color within the three institutions, including tenure and non-tenure track temporary full-time faculty; designing a shared learning experience with clear outcomes through faculty development and mentorship; creating a sense of community for the recruited faculty; providing seed funding for scholarships and research; improving the academic climate at all three schools to support faculty of color; and ensuring the model is property implemented.

Black, Hispanic, and Latinx students make up 33% of the student population in U.S. higher education institutions and 13% of the proportion of earned STEM doctorates, according to Framingham State, but at the same time they only represent 9% of the STEM workforce and only 6% of tenure-track STEM faculty in American Colleges.

“Research clearly demonstrates that students of color perform better when they are guided by professors from similar backgrounds and lived experiences,” Reema Zeineldin, associate vice president for academic affairs at Framingham State and the lead principal investigator on the grant application, said. “This alliance of three institutions aspires to provide a replicable supportive model on best practices in inclusion and equity for increasing representation and persistence of faculty of color in STEM. We are grateful to the NSF for its support of the effort.”