 | Curtis Patton admires a portrait of Edward Bouchet, Yale's first African-American graduate, who has served as an inspiration to him. As this year's recipient of the Bouchet Award, Patton is honored for helping to make Yale a more diverse campus. |
The time that Curtis Patton first heard about Edward Bouchet -- the first African-American graduate of Yale College -- was not exactly one of his shining moments.
Patton -- now professor of epidemiology and public health and head of the Division of Global Health -- had dozed off in his math class at Fisk University, prompting his teacher, Lee Lorch, to call on him. Not surprisingly, Patton answered with an inappropriate response. As a subtle way of suggesting to Patton that he was wasting his time, Lorch brought up the example of the steadfast Bouchet.
The year was 1952, 100 years after Bouchet was born in New Haven, the son of a Yale porter. Bouchet entered Yale College in 1870, and graduated with highest honors in 1874, the first African American ever to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to carry out graduate studies and research in physics at Yale with two of the most prominent physicists of the 19th century, earning his doctorate in 1876 and becoming the first African American in the United States to earn a Ph.D.
Bouchet's story made an impression on Patton, and he took his teacher's message to heart. Later, his interest in Bouchet was rekindled when Patton arrived as a new member of the microbiology faculty at Yale in 1970. Since then, Patton has worked to ensure that Bouchet's contributions would be memorialized and celebrated.
It was therefore a fitting honor -- as well as a shining moment -- when Patton was presented the Edward A. Bouchet Leadership Award at the Yale Graduate School's May 23 Convocation.
The Bouchet Leadership Award is a national award given to leaders in academia who have played a critical role in diversifying higher education, who are outstanding in their own fields of study, and who serve as role models to students of all ages, says Liza Cariaga-Lo, assistant dean and director of the Office for Diversity and Equal Opportunity at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and assistant clinical professor at the Child Study Center and the School of Medicine. The award was established at Yale in 2002 as part of the University's yearlong celebration of the 150th anniversary of Bouchet's birth.
In presenting the award to Patton, then-Graduate School dean Peter Salovey, now dean of Yale College, praised the Yale scientist for his "dedicated leadership and steadfast commitment to ensuring that history remembers men like Edward A. Bouchet, who pushed his institution (Yale) and indeed this nation to recognize that African-American and other minority scholars were vital to the production of knowledge in the academy."
The award also recognizes Patton's contributions to research on microbial diseases and his dedication to enhancing graduate-student life and serving as a role model and mentor to "countless" students, faculty and administrators. Said Salovey in his citation: "In every way and at every level in the life of this University, you have built bridges and created opportunities for students of color, women and other underrepresented students."
For Patton, who was the unanimous choice of the Bouchet Award nominating committee, Bouchet stands out for both his scholarship and his character.
"Scholarship and manly deeds," says Patton, "were among the wonderful things about Bouchet and 19th-century Yale. Neither was daunted by the odds; neither was fearful of racial issues then current. Both demonstrated emotional, political and intellectual courage in 1870 when Bouchet was admitted to Yale College and more courage still when the graduate faculty in physics admitted Bouchet for doctoral studies."
Bouchet was not sought after to serve on the faculty at the few prestigious universities which had graduate schools at that time, and devoted his career to the education of young African Americans, teaching chemistry and physics for 26 years at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, and later serving as director of academics at the St. Paul Normal and Industrial School; principal of Lincoln High School in Galipolis, Ohio; and instructor at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas.
Cariaga-Lo says that Patton has continued the efforts to promote gender, racial and ethnic diversity at Yale begun in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the administration of Yale President Kingman Brewster. She notes that he has been involved in such efforts both at "the departmental level" and in "day-to-day interactions with the students ... [and] the relationships that he's cultivated over the years, both at the national level as well as at the university level." Cariaga-Lo adds that Patton is always willing to talk and give guidance to students "whether they are 10th graders who are still just trying to figure out where they want to be or if they want to go to college, or graduate students who are having a hard time in a particular department."
Patton believes that the individual efforts of faculty members and students are critical to promoting campus diversity. Students, he notes, are often responsible for "bringing others like them to [Yale] and convincing others that [Yale] is a good place to study."
In addition to their dedication to promoting diversity, Patton and previous Bouchet Leadership Award winners, Cariaga-Lo says, share an understanding that there are still strides to be made with respect to accessibility and equity issues in higher education.
Previous Bouchet Leadership Award recipients include Freeman Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Dieter Soll, a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale; Cecil Pickett, president of Schering-Plough Research Institute; Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University; Orlando Taylor, vice provost for research and dean of the Graduate School at Howard University; and Homer Neal, professor of physics and former interim president of the University of Michigan.
-- By Christy Gordon
T H I S
Bouchet Award recognizes scientist's
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