PHILADELPHIA—More than 450 conference attendees from various academic disciplines and interests converged onto Philadelphia last Thursday to participate in a two-day inaugural conference of the Black Doctoral Network Conference (BDN).
Despite the nearly 2,000 African-Americans who earn doctoral degrees in this country every year, they often go unnoticed and unrecognized even though many are engaged in cutting-edge research. According to the conference organizers, they are invisible minorities.
“Our success needs to be seen and celebrated,” says Maurice Green, a doctoral student in criminology at the City University of New York (CUNY) who organized the conference and founded the BDN in 2011. “If other Blacks don’t see us, they can’t inspire to be like us.”
Like many other African-Americans in academe, Green has had his share of frustrating moments. At times, he has felt isolated and lonely while pursuing his degree. Several years ago, he actively sought out the opportunity to meet other Black doctoral students and recent Ph.D. recipients from surrounding New York institutions and subsequently came up with the idea to establish BDN—a clearinghouse of sorts—aimed at connecting Black Ph.D.s and soon-to-be Ph.D.s for networking, collaborating, and even publishing with each other across academic disciplines.
What started as a networking opportunity on Facebook has morphed into a full-fledged organization with a clear message: to bring together Black academicians to help generate real solutions to some of the country’s most vexing problems.
“It’s really important that we dismantle this idea that scholars can’t be activists,” says Green, who is in the final stages of completing his dissertation on African-American males who hail from impoverished backgrounds and have gone on to become university professors. “We are all operating in the silos of our discipline, and we are not talking to each other.”
