Diverse Issues in Higher Education October 18, 2011 RX for Success: Xavier Ranks Among the Top Producers of Black Students Accepted by Medical School by B. Denise Hawkins Even on the sixth anniversary of the hurricane that buckled the Crescent City in 2005, left much of Xavier University of New Orleans under water and its faculty and students scattered by the rushing winds, Dr. JW Carmichael didn't expect to be talking that morning about Katrina. For him it was a horrific storm that nearly drowned a hundred dreams as his students prepared their applications for medical school. But on Katrina's anniversary, Carmichael and his team of two pre-med advisors were off and running, readying this year's 359 new pre-med majors for where they planned to land in the year 2015 - medical school - and inching Xavier's juniors and seniors closer to taking and acing the penultimate exam of their undergraduate career - the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT. For the 71-year-old Carmichael, director of Xavier's renowned pre-med program, that morning's conversation was like most of the ones that he has, even with a stranger. It centered on the people he says he cares most deeply about, "my students." As he does every year, in July, Carmichael posted the names of the students who "made it" in 2010. Ninety-five percent of the 359 Xavier students accepted into medical, dental, veterinary medicine, optometry, podiatric medicine, chiropractic, public health, or health administration programs, he says, were African-American. Of those Xavier graduates, 248 enrolled in medical school and 42 went to dental school. But Carmichael, the man that Xavier University President Norman Francis calls "an icon in STEM education for minority students," is, in an instant, haunted by the time he didn't get all of his deserving and prepared students into medical school. It must have been the late 1970s or early 1980s, recalls Carmichael. It was the time that "I felt that I didn't do as much as I should have or could have to help get them in (medical school). I couldn't help but think that it was my fault. "I said never again," adds Carmichael of the vow he made then not to let distractions and competing faculty demands detract him from his goal. As he talked about the destruction left in Hurricane Katrina's wake, Carmichael remembered that vow and recounted the harrowing story that may explain why many of his students, colleagues and those in the academy call him part-hero and part-educator. Vacationing in Texas with his brother when Katrina arrived in 2005, a health-challenged Carmichael worked successfully, around the clock, and from a distance, to keep his scattered pre-med students on track for applying to medical school even as most of their records and letters of recommendation were swallowed by Katrina. Despite the natural disaster, 103 Xavier students in fall 2006 were accepted into medical, dental, pharmacy and other professional health schools. Today, Carmichael says, Xavier is solidly among the nation's top 10 producers of African- American students placed into medical schools, but it isn't in its long-held No.1 spot. Pre-med students who started during and immediately after the hurricane have since graduated, but campus-wide, enrollment a decade later is still in recovery mode post-Katrina. In 2008, historically Black Meharry Medical College presented Carmichael with an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree for "his success in making Xavier the undisputed leader in African American medical school acceptances." It also was an opportunity to reunite with more than 40 Xavier graduates who were studying or had trained as physicians at Meharry, one of the top medical school choices for his students. Louisiana's School of Medicine and its New Orleans Medical School, Howard University College of Medicine, Morehouse School of Medicine, and the University of Texas admit most of Xavier's graduates, he pointed out. Birthing a Vision for the Sciences Francis is fond of telling the story of Katharine Drexel, the Philadelphia heiress turned Catholic nun and later saint. Drexel's mission and Xavier's history are as intertwined as rice and gumbo. In fact, Francis says, Xavier owes its national reputation in STEM in part to the early vision of St. Katharine Drexel. When she and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, or SBS, opened the university in 1925, Drexel anticipated nearly a century ago that those she educated at the nation's only historically Black Catholic university would need doctors, dentists and pharmacists of their own and ones who looked like them, says Francis, a mathematician and educator who was trained at Xavier. Today, Francis credits his faculty - lay people and Catholic Church workers - for embracing Drexel's vision for creating well-trained Black science and health scholars and for first believing that all students can achieve. But for Francis, there is no time to rest on his laurels. With growing minority health needs across the state and in the Delta, compounded by Katrina, Francis announced that Xavier in 2012 will begin offering undergraduate degrees in public health. He's tapped Dr. Leonard Jack Jr., associate dean for research and director of the university's Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education, to head its new Public Health Institute with funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation. Dr. Kathleen Kennedy, dean of Xavier's College of Pharmacy, also is making sure that her students are being trained to help meet the growing health care and medical needs of local communities plagued by health disparities. St. Katharine Drexel, who opened a college of pharmacy on the campus in 1927, just two years after launching Xavier, would likely be astounded at how far the roots she planted have flung, Francis marveled. Reaching into local high schools with Xavier's signature pre-college programs, Kennedy says she is looking for new recruits to the university and the profession. Most teens, she says, are first attracted to the field's earning potential then to the vast opportunities it offers beyond just dispensing medications. Health disparities, nanotechnology, diabetes and cancer are among the research and practice areas in the college of pharmacy, which is fast gaining national attention for its annual health disparities conference, now in its fifth year. Student-centered mentoring approaches also are gaining success in the college, Kennedy said. "We focus on the success of our students as they progress through the year, using a volunteer student mentoring program." Upperclassmen are participating in the pilot program that connects them to first-year students using social networking tools like Facebook to support mentoring. In the program, faculty are also engaging with new students by involving them at the start of their academic careers in research projects, Kennedy says. A Formula for Success Just a week into the new fall semester and already Antonio Roberts of Alexandria, La., is sounding a bit winded and worn as he recites his hefty course load. But the 19-year-old sophomore biology/premed major says that he wouldn't have it any other way. "I've had my eye on Xavier for a long time. I knew that if I wanted to get into medical school, this was the best place that I could be," says Roberts who along with his three siblings was raised by his grandmother. Roberts, like many promising pre-med students from the region, began his trek while in high school taking summer enrichment courses that were a part of the educational pathway paved by Xavier faculty. The first generation college student received a four-year scholarship from Xavier. Longtime biology professor Sister Grace Mary Flickinger, S.B.S., remembers being at the epicenter of the academic storm that she and other science faculty saw brewing in the early 1970s. They witnessed, she said, a growing number of students entering with dreams of being dentists, physicians, and pharmacists - but emerging from poor homes, the worst public schools and ill-prepared for the rigors of college and coursework in the sciences. Hired by Francis nearly four decades ago to direct Xavier's pre-med program, "Carmichael was the enzyme, the catalyst that got us started," says Flickinger, who was among the faculty collective that banded together in support of students and their dreams. Francis says he remembers faculty asking then, "'What will it take to improve student outcomes in the sciences?'" An aggressive strategy and a series of summer enrichment programs the faculty devised to help bolster the achievement of their struggling students were what helped land Xavier on the map, Francis adds. Says Carmichael of the faculty's plan: "We could immediately see that working across departmental lines and standardizing our courses so all teachers taught the same thing in the various lecture sections had improved the number of students who passed the entry-level 'weedout' courses in the sciences." On their way to gaining those results, the faculty also experienced the unexpected - "modest increases in the number of students who gained entry into medical, dental, and other professional schools," Carmichael says. Their largest and most dramatic gains in student placements and in removing barriers to student success, however, "came in the early 1990s as a result of major funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute," Carmichael adds. "This funding allowed us to better coordinate a number of activities that had previously been funded year by year from a number of sources. As a result, we had large increases in the number of students gaining placement and Xavier becoming No. 1 nationally for placing African-Americans into medical school." Kennedy, Carmichael, and Flickinger credit Francis for supporting ongoing and innovative efforts to improve their programs and support their students. "Dr. Francis was great. He hired you to do a job, assumed you could do it until proven wrong, and then left you alone," says Carmichael, who left a tenured-track post at the University of Arkansas to come to Xavier. "At the same time, Dr. Francis was always ready to support efforts to obtain external funding and to make sure you had adequate space and facilities to do your job." But even with a winning educational pathway of courses and student-centered support strategies in the sciences, getting into and through medical and graduate school can be out of reach for some deserving students who are saddled with family and financial obligations, Flickinger said. And for Carmichael, finding " a reliable way to help the small group of students who work hard, make good grades, and could make it through medical [school], but just can't score high enough to get in," remains elusive. SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 404.592.4820 Skype:sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.