Stanford program to diversify academia celebrating its 10th anniversary

Since Stanford launched the Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence Doctoral Fellowship Program (DARE) a decade ago, more than 150 alumni of the program have launched careers in academia, industry and government after earning PhDs on the Farm.

Anika Green is assistant vice provost for graduate education and director of the DARE Doctoral Fellowship Program. (Image credit: Caitlyn Craft)

To honor their achievements, Stanford invited former DARE Fellows back to campus for DARE@10 Homecoming: Conference & Celebration, a three-day event that opened Sunday with informal social gatherings – including a wine tasting at the Stanford Faculty Club – and continues today with a professional development conference.

All told, more than 160 DARE alumni and current fellows are taking part in the event, including three people who traveled from London, Mauritius and Mexico City.

Tonight, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, an associate justice of the California Supreme Court and a former law professor at Stanford, will give the keynote address at a dinner at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center.

Anika Green, assistant vice provost for graduate education and director of the DARE Fellowship Program, said the former fellows have been eagerly awaiting this homecoming.

“DARE Fellows are a community of scholars who are lifelong colleagues,” she said. “We’re thrilled to be able to offer this conference and celebration as an opportunity for them to engage with one another and the broader Stanford community. The possibilities that may come from this are endless. As one DARE alumna put it, ‘DARE isn’t just changing some Stanford students’ lives, it’s changing the world.’”

The DARE Fellowship, which is awarded during the last two years of a student’s PhD program, was established by the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education in 2008. With the resources provided by the fellowship, Stanford prepares students from diverse backgrounds to pursue and succeed in academic careers.

The program for the Nov. 11-13 homecoming event includes receptions, dinners and a professional development conference for DARE alumni and the 43 current DARE Fellows, including 22 doctoral candidates who were recently selected for the 2018-2020 cohort.

Today’s professional development conference will offer workshops focused on four themes: being a diverse scholar in the academy; strategies to advance one’s career; “lift as you climb”; and preparing for the future.

Among the Stanford faculty members serving as panelists in the workshops are Rosemary Knight, a professor of geophysics who will talk about funding STEM research, and Tomás Jiménez, an associate professor of sociology who will talk about preparing for tenure.

Patricia J. Gumport, vice provost for graduate education and postdoctoral affairs, will take part in a panel focused on leadership in higher education.

“Diversifying the academy has been a long-standing goal across higher education, and the need to do so is even more evident now,” said Gumport, who is also a professor of education. “Stanford’s support of the DARE Program and our fellows has enabled them to begin to have significant impact that is both far-reaching and transformative nationally.”

Among the former DARE Fellows serving as panelists in the workshops are:

• Kenneth Gibbs Jr., a program director at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. He was recently interviewed about the future of graduate biomedical education by Scope, a Stanford Medicine blog.

• Jennifer Harford Vargas, an associate professor of English and co-director of the Latin American, Latina/o and Iberian Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of the 2017 book Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel.

• Courtney Bonam, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a co-author of “Invisible middle-class Black space: Asymmetrical person and space stereotyping at the race–class nexus,” recently published in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.

On the final morning of the event, the former DARE Fellows will give research presentations at the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Earth, the Graduate School of Education, Stanford Law, Stanford Engineering and Stanford Medicine. In the afternoon, DARE alumni will meet with current graduate and undergraduate students.