Title
The Minority Faculty Association
Files
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Identifier
JonesL_01_20140115-Final_Clip03
Publication Date
1-15-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
And I wanted to ask you—I mean, I want to ask you about all of those initiatives, but why don’t we start with the Committee, that I believe you co-founded with Dr. Buzdar, for Minority Faculty and Administrators.
Lovell Jones, PhD
Actually, it was started with Kenji Nishioka [phonetic].
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Oh, okay.
Lovell Jones, PhD
We approached Aman as the clinical person, but I had been a part of the Minority Faculty Association that started for the entire Medical Center.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
When was that started? I mean, was that existing? Did that exist when you arrived on campus?
Lovell Jones, PhD
Oh, no. Late eighties.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Were you involved in the founding of that organization?
Lovell Jones, PhD
Yeah, was one of the founding members, actually served as its chair three times. People joke and said not a lot of people want to stand up and be a target for the arrows. But there hadn’t been anything here, and the Minority Faculty Organization, there were people here afraid to join it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Really?
Lovell Jones, PhD
Mm-hmm.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Why was that? I mean, it may seem obvious, but really I—
Lovell Jones, PhD
Negative, I guess, blowback, because the Minority Faculty Association actually pushed for the first survey of women and minorities in terms of faculty, in terms of salary equity, and brought it to the Board of Regents and a lot of other people, and led to a lot of changes in faculty salary levels, and that was not something that the administrations were very happy with, either over at the Health Science Center or here.
And there were things here that will needed to be done, and so I figured if we could get a Minority Faculty and Administrators Committee set up here, then it would give some umbrella or them to join the larger organization. So I went around and actually got signatures from a large group of the minority faculty and submitted it to the administration and said, “We need to have this.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Now, in terms of minority faculty and administrators, was there pretty universal agreement that something was needed but people were afraid, or was there controversy?
Lovell Jones, PhD
No, I think it was pretty much agreed that it was needed, but there was controversy about joining it, in that it’d be quite visible. So what we did was—and I forgot, it may have been Aman, but we had three co-chairs, one from the administration, one from the clinical side, and the basic science side. I was the [unclear] from the basic science side.
Ultimately, that effort, when the Office for Institutional Diversity came into existence, that committee rotated under that office, and then it got changed to—what is it now—Multicultural Affairs or something. That’s the group that meets, but it’s interesting that they have no idea of the history of how that got started.
Recommended Citation
Jones, Lovell Ph.D. and Rosolowski, Tacey A. Ph.D., "The Minority Faculty Association" (2014). Race, Gender, & Work @ The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center: Triumphs of Houston’s Leading Hospital. 29.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_racegenderwork/29
