8. Doctoral Pathways via Racial Health Equity: Bridging the Apartheid of Knowledge with California State University Alumni

Abstract

Abstract Using CRT concepts of whiteness as property and interest convergence we show how opportunities for doctoral study are “raced and restricted.” The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education promised universal access and choice through a tripartite system (California Community Colleges/California State University (CSU)/University of California (UC)). We contend that this system of higher education has perpetuated the apartheid of knowledge by structurally limiting the doctoral trajectories of CSU undergraduate alumni. Constraining opportunities for knowledge production to students with access to whiteness while directing CSU undergraduate alumni into the workforce further reproduces race-ethnic inequality.This unusual case study focuses on the Minority Training Program in Cancer Control Research (MTPCCR), a summer training program that has promoted research careers among master’s level students and professionals since 1999. We analyzed alumni survey responses and doctoral statuses to identify CSU undergraduate alumni’s barriers to and facilitators for matriculation into doctoral programs. By increasing participants’ access to networks and resources and leveraging motivations for racial health equity, MTPCCR connected CSU undergraduate alumni to pathways to the doctorate. To disrupt the apartheid of knowledge, more pathways to knowledge production for social change must be mapped out for undergraduate alumni from teaching universities where first-generation students of color are concentrated.