MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY
This excellent comment by Alex Guerrero (a JD/PhD student at NYU) from the earlier thread deserves additional notice, so I repost it here, and open comments again for suggestions in line with Mr. Guerrero's concluding query:
A few concrete things: (1) Find out whether your campus has a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. This program is geared toward getting members of underrepresented minority groups to pursue PhDs (of all kinds, but with an eye toward academia) and includes financial support for undergrads (helped me stop working 20 hours a week while in school), mentorship, information on the academic life, and some support while doing the PhD. There are 100 or so campuses involved, but philosophers could take a more active role, could try to bring a program to their campus, and could encourage students to apply (and serve as mentors). (2) Talk to promising members of underrepresented groups about becoming academics. Don't assume this is on anyone's radar, or that they know anything about it. Don't laugh, but it wasn't until my junior year that I learned that not only did one not have to pay tuition to get a PhD, but that one would also get a living stipend, at least at many programs. This changed my thinking considerably! Members of underrepresented groups are less likely to know much about the academic world (that follows pretty directly from the underrepresentation!). And small gestures of interest and support can go a long way. (3) Encourage students to apply for outside fellowships like the Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and the Jacob Javits Fellowship. I believe that the latter, in particular, takes membership in a historically underrepresented group into account. These can help with funding packages and admission to PhD programs. (4) Consider learning some philosophy outside of the traditional Western canon, and consider teaching it within a standard philosophy course. This is not easy and perhaps controversial as advice, but it seems to me that one of the problems is that the people in the mainstream don't know very much about, say, what gets called Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, Native American Philosophy, or African Philosophy. As a result, most departments don't have anyone to teach classes that include the work of anyone from outside of the traditional canon, nor do departments see this as a problem (in the way that they might if, say, they didn't have anyone who works in metaphysics). Of course, some work that falls under these headings would not appeal to a standard analytic philosopher (whatever that is). But some of it clearly would. I have dabbled a bit in African Philosophy, and anyone interested in philosophy of mind and personal identity would (I think) greatly enjoy Kwame Gyekye's book _An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme_. Those working in ethics or aesthetics would probably get something out of Barry Hallen's book _The Good, The Bad, and The Beautiful: Discourse about Values in Yoruba Culture_. It is of course natural to be afraid of dilettantism or worse, and this kind of step is obviously no fix for some of the larger problems (nor is it guaranteed to appeal to those from underrepresented groups), but it seems worth doing and relatively manageable. One thing that would be useful would be for experts in these canons to identify work that might be of interest to, say, contemporary analytic philosophers.
