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21Reflections on diversityLouise M. RyanSchool of Mathematical SciencesUniversity of Technology, Sydney, Australia21.1 IntroductionIrecallquitevividlythestartintheearly1990sofmyinterestinfosteringdiversity in higher education. Professor James Ware had just been appointedas the Academic Dean at Harvard School of Public Health and was letting goof some of his departmental responsibilities. He asked if I would take over asdirector of the department’s training grant in environmental statistics, fundedthrough the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).Being an ambitious young associate professor, I eagerly accepted. It wasn’tlong before I had to start preparing the grant’s competitive renewal. Thesewere the days when funding agencies were becoming increasingly proactive interms of pushing Universities on the issue of diversity and one of the requiredsections in the renewal concerned minority recruitment and retention. Notknowing much about this, I went for advice to the associate dean for studentaffairs, a bright and articulate African American woman named Renee (not hertrue name). When I asked her what the School was doing to foster diversity,she chuckled and said “not much!” She suggested that I let her know whenI was traveling to another city and she would arrange for me to visit somecolleges with high minority enrollments so that I could engage with studentsand teachers to tell them about opportunities for training in biostatistics atHarvard.Not long after this, I received an invitation to speak at the University ofMississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. I excitedly called Renee to tell her aboutmy invitation, naively commenting that since I would be visiting a universityin the South, there must be lots of minority students there with whom I couldtalk about opportunities in Biostatistics. She laughed and said “Louise, it’sa bit more complicated than that...” She went on to tell me about some ofthe history associated with “Ole Miss,” including the riots in the early 60striggered by the brave efforts of African American, James Meredith, to enroll229