MORE MINORITY B-SCHOOL PROFS
GOAL OF THE PHD PROJECT

The KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation began a program in 1994 to encourage minorities--African, Hispanic, and Native Americans--to enter PhD programs that would lead to professorships at American business schools. The program recognizes that nationwide the business school faculties are overwhelmingly white. The movement began when several prominent businesses decided to act on their concerns over a scarcity of qualified minority students entering business schools and ultimately the managerial and professional ranks. The absence of minority professors was viewed as a discouragement to minority undergraduates from entering the business schools.

A strong marketing, recruiting, and networking effort as part of the project has led to a surge of admission applications by minorities into PhD programs. Supporting the KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation are the Graduate Management Admission Council, Citibank, American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, Black Enterprise magazine, Chrysler Corporation Fund, Fannie Mae Foundation, Ford Motor Company, General Mills, Texaco, and 84 universities.

"Diversifying the front of the classroom, the professor's lectern, is key to diversifying the rest of the classroom--therefore producing more minority business school graduates who can then assume positions of responsibility in corporate America," says Bernard J. Milano, a KPMG partner who founded the project. *