BY JOHN J. BYCZKOWSKI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
When the brokerage Kidder Peabody shut its doors amid scandal in 1994, Ana Leonard - an information technology professional there - interpreted it as a message from God: Go back to school and get your Ph.D.
It was something she always wanted to do, but she saw many obstacles. She had a family, a one-income household. And, as a black woman, Ms. Leonard didn't see academia as necessarily open to her.
"The impetus that really made me get up and do it was the PhD Project," she said, giving credit to a program aimed at recruiting minorities to become college business professors.
Today begins the project's three-day conference in Chicago. And there, Ms. Leonard - a doctoral student of organizational behavior at the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration - will return the favor, helping to recruit other minority doctoral candidates. About 400 candidates will attend, to be recruited by 70 business schools, including UC.
UC's College of Business Administration recently received a $300,000 grant from the GE Fund to help it recruit minority Ph.D. candidates. The college hopes to use the money to recruit two new minority doctoral students each year for the next three years. The college today has just three minority doctoral students out of 33 full-time doctoral students.
This push for more doctoral candidates in business schools grew out of a program started by the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick. Alarmed by the lack of minority applicants for accounting jobs, the firm came to believe that "there are so few minorities in the accounting classroom because there are so few minorities in front of the classroom," said Ralph Katerberg, the CBA's associate dean for academic affairs, who will also attend the conference. "Without role models, it's uphill."
KPMG then found that was true throughout business schools, and extended its recruiting effort.
Ms. Leonard found the project in a three-line ad in the New York Times calling for applicants.
"I went thinking 'I can't do this, I have a family.' Everyone there had families. 'I can't do this on one income.' Everyone there was living on one income," she said. "Every obstacle, I would meet someone there who had obstacles they'd overcome, and I heard how they did it."
UC will use the grant money to help soften the financial blow for the students. Mr. Katerberg said doctoral candidates will get a stipend of $18,000 a year to start - almost double what the typical doctoral candidate gets - and that will increase to $28,000 a year as their work progresses.
