Eight new grants will help faculty and academic departments across the University of Michigan enhance relationships with partner colleges and universities through the school’s fledgling Minority Serving Institutions Office.
The office, housed in the Rackham Graduate School, is a formal mechanism to better support efforts across campus to cultivate and strengthen relationships with MSIs and eventually develop strong, long-term partnerships.
Office coordinator Edmund Graham serves as a focal point in the work to bolster outreach efforts by U-M to historically Black colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs) and other MSIs ranging from Morgan State University to the University of Texas at El Paso.
Graham provides faculty, department and program-level support “because those are where the conversations take place and where the students are,” he said. “We take an institutional responsibility approach and try to reach out and collaboratively build inter-institutional rapport between the university and minority serving institutions.”
The relationships help U-M, a large and predominantly White institution, better understand and value diversity in perspectives and also help shift the focus of equity conversations from deficits to assets, Graham said.
The deliberate relationship-building and partnership-forging also enhance pathways for minority undergraduate students – who are historically underrepresented at PWIs – to seek advanced degrees at U-M after graduating from their MSI.
For Graham, the role has meant synthesizing U-M’s various efforts to collaborate with MSIs. His approach is informed by experiences at both types of schools, having earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing at Grambling State University nd a master’s degree in human resource education at the University of Minnesota.
