Partners in name only? With the Department of Homeland Security awarding multimillion-dollar grants, minority-serving institutions are positioning themselves to lead, rather than just support majority institutions

When Jackson State University officials and their collaborators assembled a proposal for a $12 million social and behavioral research center to combat terrorism, they hoped Federal officials would give a nod of approval to what they believed was a high-value concept.

The proposal, Featuring the predominantly White Mississippi State University as the lead and the historically Black Jackson State as a partner, apparently impressed U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials enough that it was among a handful of finalists. Site visits took place. Hopes ran high.

So naturally, both schools were disappointed when the multimillion-dollar, three-year grant went to a University of Maryland-College Park-led partnership of institutions (see Black Issues, Jan. 27).

But Jackson State wasted no time forming a new partnership to compete for a DHS research center on emergency preparedness and response. As of a week before the April 22 government deadline for proposals, Jackson State officials had not only agreed to a major role in one consortium but were also considering becoming a minor player in two others to better the odds of winning the multimillion-dollar grant.

"Minority institutions have plenty of things to offer and to bring to the table," says Dr. Felix Okojie, Jackson State's vice president for research development, support and federal relations. "We are at a point where we call lead."

Dr. Mel Bernstein, DHS director of university programs, adds: "Minority institutions are becoming integral parts of these teams. Our goal is that all the proposals have minority representation."

But that hasn't always been the case. Of the four multimillion--dollar DHS grants awarded so Far for multidisciplinary anti-terrorism research, Bernstein recalls only one application featuring an undisclosed minority-serving college as its lead. The grants finance university-based Homeland Security "Centers of Excellence," each with a different specialty, conducting work on potential terrorist threats.

The existing centers are led by the University of Southern California, the University of Minnesota and Texas A&M University. The Maryland center --scheduled to start up this month and includes the historically Black Morehouse College and Howard University and the heavily Hispanic University of New Mexico--will be the fourth center. DHS officials expect to award funds for a fifth center focusing on emergency preparedness later this year--up to a total of seven, Bernstein says. In addition, two "Cooperative Centers" will be named with funds from federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Centers of Excellence are by no means the only DHS off, rings to higher education. Through its Office of Domestic Preparedness, DHS offers funds to community colleges for support training programs. And during 2004-05, 174 undergraduates and graduate students from 93 schools in the country participated in the DHS Scholars and Fellows program. Seven schools are minority-serving institutions and 20 percent of the students are Black or from another under-represented minority. All DHS scholars and fellows received tuition, lees, monthly stipends plus a summer internship involving homeland security initiatives.

However, the prestigious Centers of Excellence are arguably the crown jewels among DHS opportunities for academia--an observation not lost among minority institutions.

"The minority-serving institutions are much more supportive of those programs that are truly collaborative than the single faculty member or the single student going somewhere for a summer. They want to move beyond intellectual exercise," says Dr. Bob Shepard, executive director of Science and Engineering Alliance, a not-for-profit group that works with Jackson State and three other historically Black colleges and universities to help broker partnerships between those schools and the public and private sectors.

VARIOUS DEGREES OF INVOLVEMENT

Minnesota's $15 million, multi-institution center, which focuses on protecting the nation's food supply, was launched last summer listing historically Black Tuskegee University among its partners. The center's Web site notes Dr. Tsegaye HabteMariam, a Tuskegee professor of epidemiology and biomedical informatics, as a collaborator.

For his part, though, HabteMariam says he hasn't been "actively involved" with Minnesota's center. When the original proposal was being developed, HabteMariam was contacted by someone involved with it that he already knew. He offered his curricula vitae and a short write-up describing his expertise in modeling risk analysis of diseases.

"It's a matter of how to get involved," HabteMariam says. "Will we just advise them if they ask for it, or will we get a cut of the monies to conduct research in an area where we have strength?"

Minnesota officials admit their outreach to minority faculty and communities is "ongoing," adding that they "have a long way to go."

The directors of the centers say that relationships among researchers at different schools can be problematic even when race isn't an issue. Dr. Randolph Hall, co-director of the USC-based center, which assesses terrorism risks and develops tools for analyzing economic and social consequences of attacks, believes the most productive work has occurred when researchers "are in clusters on one campus, where you can come out of the offices and labs, talk in the hallways and such."

Otherwise, he says, it's "hard to keep everyone engaging with each other even with videoconferencing and e-mail" when teams are spread out across several states.

Hall's observations were among those shared during a series of DHS-sponsored minority outreach workshops at universities during the spring 2005 semester. Comments and questions from university reps at the workshops ranged from "How do we improve our chances of winning a Center of Excellence?" to "How do we avoid getting used by institutions that simply want a minority school's name without a true partnership?"

In many respects, the atmosphere at a DHS workshop at USC was much like a job fair, with business cards being swapped, introductions being made and university reps networking with the reds and with each other.

Dialogue during the workshops underscored the disparities between large, predominantly White research universities and their small, historically Black counterparts. "Some large schools have someone searching the Web full-time for grant opportunities," says Laura Petonito, DHS deputy director of university programs. "Many of the minority institutions don't have that luxury."

With that in mind, DHS officials have started taking steps to try to get more minority institutions and researchers on board. For instance, when DHS posts announcements on its Web site soliciting proposals for subsequent Centers of Excellence, officials plan to e-mail the news to interested individuals rather than hope they will find the information on their own. And before last month's deadline for proposals for the center on emergency preparedness, DHS sponsored an online bulletin board for researchers to post their areas of expertise so that they could more efficiently find partners.

As a rule, DHS officials don't discuss the proposals for centers and publicize only the names of the winners, not the finalists. Jackson State's Okojie says their earlier, Mississippi State-led proposal for the social and behavioral research center included attention to rural issues, undergraduate education and outreach to K-12 communities. Their other partners included the likes of Harvard University, the University of Hawaii and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Out of more than 20 proposals, theirs was one of only six that drew site visits, offering encouragement that DHS officials were giving them high marks.

"It was very disappointing to not win after all the time and effort pulling it together," Okojie says. "But we were highly competitive, and we will keep trying."

The DHS allows colleges and universities to form more than one partnership and therefore submit more than one proposal. To that end, the Hispanic-serving University of Texas-San Antonio is a supporting partner in three different consortia vying for the fifth Center of Excellence. The efforts mark UTSA's first forays into the competition for such a center. Late last year, UTSA officials announced the creation of its Institute for the Protection of American Communities to provide technical expertise and solutions to security challenges.

IPAC executive director Lawson Magruder says that even in his short tenure, he has observed that "most universities are not organized for success" in applying for one of these centers. "Deans and department chairs are busy every day. Education and research are done by so many people, sometimes piecemeal. But there has to be unity in effort. You have to be organized and do an inventory to know what your competencies are."

Shepard, of Science and Engineering Alliance, also a paid subcontractor of DHS, believes the federal agency should continue stepping up its minority outreach. "We have demonstrated our ability. DHS has to have the will to step up to the plate. Many of us have worked for the inclusion of HBCUs and MSIs (minority-serving institutions) for so long that it appears time will run out on the current generation, which ensures that successive generations will continue to fight the same battles into perpetuity."

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