PRESIDENT'S LETTER

A Perfect World
(Yes, another Clint Eastwood movie title)

Roger Hangarter

In a perfect world, people from all racial and ethnic groups would be proportionally represented in the plant biology research community. Unfortunately, our profession does not come close to representing a perfect world. Any observant attendee at ASPB annual meetings will be aware of the dearth of underrepresented minorities among the participants. Clearly, ASPB, and our discipline as a whole, has yet to achieve anything close to a critical mass of underrepresented minorities.

The ASPB Minority Affairs Committee (MAC) was established in 1995 in recognition of the fact that ASPB’s American membership does not reflect the demographic composition of the overall U.S. population. MAC’s goal has been to work to change this status quo. To this end the committee has, over the past 10 years, instituted a number of activities at ASPB annual meetings. However, despite these efforts, we have seen only incremental changes in minority participation.

Although important to the Society’s long-term goal, it is not sufficient to focus on attracting new members (i.e., students) to ASPB who happen to be minorities. ASPB and its membership need to develop ways to effectively engage in plant biology research faculty from institutions in which many minority students are educated. And at the same time, we also need to address the lack of minority representation at the higher levels of scholarship in plant biology.

Here, I would like to outline a couple of the ideas that MAC has been discussing that may help turn the tide. Hopefully, this discussion will help convince more ASPB members to become involved in the process and contribute additional ideas—as well as actions—that will help make our science and our Society more inclusive.

Many of the institutions that educate minorities in the United States consider themselves to be primarily “teaching institutions” and have not been able to make the kind of investments in the research infrastructure that are commonplace in the larger research institutions. These “minority serving institutions” (MSIs) often require their science faculty to engage in research to obtain promotion and tenure, despite the fact that many do not have the kind of major grant support that they need to do cutting-edge research or to attend scientific meetings. So one recommendation is that ASPB should identify and work with individual faculty and administrators at MSIs to educate them about the benefits of establishing a plant-based research program. Compared to animal research, plant research typically requires fewer resources, which translates into a greater likelihood of establishing an independent research program that could also provide rigorous scientific training for students. If we are going to persuade anyone of the merits of plant biology research, however, it will also be necessary to talk to these faculty and administrators about the broad range of career opportunities in the plant sciences and basic biology research that are not directly medically related.

Finding ways to support the professional development of MSI faculty represents another important plank in the platform that ASPB would like to help build. For example, MAC is investigating ways in which ASPB might facilitate the development of true working collaborations between investigators from an MSI and an established investigator at a larger research university. A related idea is to provide travel awards to MSI faculty members with the expectation that they would bring a number of students with them to the ASPB annual meeting. The point here is to seek to engage both faculty members and their students, which is likely to be more effective than focusing on just one component in the equation. Our hope is that the faculty engagement part will have long-term benefits because each positively affected MSI faculty member will interact with many students over future years. Additionally, the students that come to the ASPB meeting can be educated as to summer research programs in plant biology in addition to learning about career opportunities related to plant biology—information they in turn may pass on to other students.

Obviously, these and many related ideas not mentioned here will require not only money to implement, but also the active participation of many plant biologists. At this time, ASPB does not have sufficient resources to fully fund many of the ideas outlined here—we can only support pilot activities or small-scale projects—so MAC is looking into other sources of funding. But even if it acquires financial support to carry out its plans, MAC doesn’t have enough members to execute these plans on its own. The successful engagement of minorities with the plant sciences will therefore require the active and dedicated participation of many individual plant biologists. In this regard, the ASPB membership represents a tremendous asset that can help make significant progress.

It is fundamentally right and good for the ASPB membership in the United States to reflect the demographics of the U.S. population. But there are reasons beyond the altruistic ones for getting involved. Ideas like those outlined here are all NSF category 2 compliant. So established investigators interested in helping to bring underrepresented minorities to the plant sciences can meet their NSF category 2 obligations with the National Science Foundation while doing so. MAC can provide assistance to investigators in developing an effective category 2 program that will help meet the goal of improving minority participation in the plant sciences. However, this is not to imply that ASPB members should leave the job to only NSF awardees or that other valuable category 2 activities should be compromised. All ASPB members can, and should, be engaged at some level in the process. Having more balanced representation of people from all racial and ethnic groups in plant biology may not result in a perfect world, but it would certainly be a better one.

Roger P. Hangarter
rhangart@indiana.edu