Background
The idea for this institute came out of the work of the Association of Departments of English (ADE) Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African Americans in the Profession [PDF]. That committee, as it examined the literature on the factors that affect the production of PhDs from underrepresented groups, produced a series of recommendations out of which came the idea for SILCS. Valerie Lee, chair of the English Department at The Ohio State University and a member of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee, suggested that a summer institute would help to increase the number of students from diverse backgrounds who would be applying to graduate programs. The rest of the committee was enthusiastic, and Paula Krebs, from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, approached The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the idea for a summer institute that would be aimed at helping to increase diversity in the professoriate in English by encouraging a broader range of undergraduates to pursue doctorates in English. Valerie Lee then adapted the SILCS model to develop the Program for Humanities Development (PHD) at Ohio State, a summer institute at that university that serves students across all humanities fields.
With the Summer Institute in Literary and Cultural Studies, the field of English became the first field in the humanities to do what math and science fields have been doing so successfully for years -- to offer a supplementary program of instruction that would take responsibility for ensuring that the future of the discipline includes a diversity of perspectives that corresponds with the nation's racial and cultural diversity.
The numbers
Of the doctorates in English awarded between 1973 and 2003, 67.3 percent went to white people. 2.4 percent went to Black, non-Hispanic recipients, 1.8 percent to Hispanic, 3.6 percent to Asians, and .02 percent to American Indians (24.8 percent of recipients reported other races or did not report race). While Asian and Native American doctoral recipients correspond fairly closely to their representation in the population of the country (4 percent and .7 percent, respectively), the percentage of PhD recipients in English amongst African-American and Latino populations in the U.S is much lower than those groups' representation in the U.S. population (approximately 12 percent each).
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