Poindexter blazes trail for minorities

Georgette Poindexter is Wharton's first tenured black woman professor. In terms of educational background and personal achievement, Georgette Poindexter is very similar to her fellow tenured colleagues in the Wharton school. However, she is certainly in a class of her own. This spring, Poindexter became only the second African-American female to be given tenure by a U.S. business school, following an earlier appointment at Harvard Business School. She is also only the second African-American professor to be given tenure at the Wharton School. Poindexter, 39, studied at Bryn Mawr and and attended law school at Harvard University. Before coming to the University in the fall of 1992, the lawyer and professor of real estate had private practices in New York City and then in Philadelphia. "I like Penn as a University and Wharton as a school," said Poindexter. "I'm very happy that I've been asked to stay." Despite the rarity of tenured minority faculty in Wharton, administrators said they are making strides in the right direction. "Yes, diversity in the workplace is important, and this is a workplace," said Deputy Dean Janice Bellace, Wharton's chief academic officer. "It's important for students to have appropriate mentors." Wharton has also sought to attack the problem at its roots by encouraging minority students to enter the world of academia. School officials received grant money from the GE Foundation to join the Faculty of the Future Program which gives women and under-represented minority students opportunities for summer research. The establishment of the endowed Whitney M. Young Jr. Professorship will also hopefully help Wharton in its mission to diversify the faculty. The chair was created by alumni in order to "allow us to recruit a scholar who will be a catalyst for a broader discussion of issues [and] a stronger sense of the richness of diversity," Wharton Dean Thomas Gerrity said in a press release. But the challenge of faculty diversification is larger than one endowed chair. A requirement for tenure at Wharton -- and at many business schools -- is a doctorate or a law degree. However, fewer U.S. college students are entering doctoral programs because it has become less appealing than simply joining the workforce straight out of college. As a result, the pool of applicants for tenure-track positions is becoming increasingly foreign-based. In Wharton, 14 percent of undergraduates are international students while one-third of MBAs and two-thirds of doctoral students are international. Of Wharton's three African-American faculty members, two of them are lawyers -- without doctoral degrees. Yet, the lack of a doctorate does not seem to have impeded Poindexter. "Undergraduates just don't understand what being a professor is like," Bellace said. "Poindexter fills a good role, she understands the broader aspects of real estate." Poindexter, despite her unique status in Wharton as an African-American female, does not see diversity as an issue plaguing the school. "I wouldn't call it a problem," Poindexter said. "There's always room for improvement, but I wouldn't say that Wharton is particularly bad at this." Of Wharton's current 188 faculty members, 11 are of Asian descent, three are African-American and one is Latino.