A Race That's About More Than Speed

Richard Tapia's brain is filled with the names of seemingly everyone who ever

ALSO SEE: Richard Tapia Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with Richard Tapia, a professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University, about his efforts to recruit and graduate more minority Ph.D.'s in mathematics and science, on Wednesday, March 26, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

drove a dragster.

There's Mickey Thompson, who raced every car of his era and earned the nickname "Mr. Speed." There's Parnelli Jones, who eventually won the Indianapolis 500. There's Craig Breedlove, who once drove the fastest car in the world. Along with Richard and his twin brother, Bobby, they all grew up in Southern California in the 1950s. It was the hotbed of drag racing. The Tapia twins were local heroes, building and racing dragsters.

But at the time, none were as famous as Art Arfons of Akron, Ohio, and his Green Monster. Powered by an aircraft engine, the behemoth could reach 180 miles per hour. The Chevrolet-powered dragster the Tapia boys had built was nimble, but it topped out at just 140 miles per hour.

So a race between the two cars in Long Beach in 1959 should not have been much of a contest. The starter raised his green flag, and the cars exploded forward. The Tapia car, driven by Bobby, flew out to the lead and crossed the finish line first.

An upset, it seemed. However, drag racing is not a race of speed. It's a contest of acceleration. You win by being the first to get a quarter-mile down the track. Your top speed, while good for bragging rights, doesn't win the race. The faster car loses to the quicker car.

The Real Issue

Coasting along at just 25 miles per hour, Richard Tapia pulls his Dodge van into a perfectly groomed industrial park. Today, he is speaking with about 40 chemists and engineers over lunch at the Chevron Phillips research center here, part of his attempt to reach out to corporations, encouraging them to provide mentors to schoolchildren and to hire minority Ph.D.'s.

For 33 years he has been a professor of applied mathematics at Rice University, but now he spends much of his time giving hundreds of talks each year, reaching out to Hispanic children, black schoolteachers, and female graduate students. The week before the Chevron speech, Mr. Tapia, 64, spoke to second graders at a Houston museum and to middle schoolers in the barrio. He is scheduled next to lecture at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and five other universities have invited him to speak after professors heard a recent talk at a math convention in Baltimore.

Across the country, he preaches how important it is for the United States to have more female and minority students in science and math.

In 2001, 1,006 people earned doctorates in mathematics at American universities. Just 19 were African-American students. Just 15 were Hispanic-Americans.

Something different is going on at Rice. Since 1998, the department of computational and applied mathematics, where Mr. Tapia works, has awarded 23 doctorates. Eight of them have gone to black or Hispanic students. Twelve, more than half of those awarded, have gone to women, compared with 27 percent nationally.

The difference is Richard Tapia. He has prodded his colleagues, reached out to grade schoolers and their teachers, encouraged undergraduates to think about research, helped graduate students survive.

While some worry about the future of affirmative action in college admissions, Mr. Tapia does not. Texas is covered by the Hopwood ruling, a 1996 federal appeals-court decision that struck down the use of race in admissions. Rice has not considered applicants' race or ethnicity in seven years.

"Using race as a factor is like putting a patch on some criterion that is wrong," he says. "Let's go back and evaluate the evaluation criteria. Can you say somebody with a 1400 [SAT score] is better than somebody with a 1350? Of course not."

After the Chevron researchers begin eating their chicken enchiladas, he is introduced. The introduction only scratches the surface, mentioning his position at Rice and his election as the first Mexican-American in the National Academy of Engineering. Not mentioned are the conferences named for him, the litany of awards he has won, and the letter from Bill Clinton hanging on his kitchen wall, congratulating him on winning a presidential award as a mentor.

Mr. Tapia has a rambling style, moving at times from one digression to another. His talks are loaded with personal stories -- about drag racing as a teenager, about his daughter singing, about his love for '57 Chevys, about the 1970 Chevelle Malibu he now exhibits at car shows.

Then he focuses on the numbers. More than 21 percent of science and engineering doctorates go to minority students. But only a sliver of them -- less than 3 percent -- go to African-Americans. Hispanic-Americans earn a similarly tiny share, about 2.6 percent. He talks about how those meager numbers are really the result of poor urban schools and low expectations. All second graders he meets, he says, love everything: their parents, school, math. But by seventh grade, he can already guess which ones will drop out.

"I don't argue we need to do this for the health of the discipline," he says. "Chemical engineering won't fail because we don't have women doing it. I argue that we need to do this for the health of the nation."

But, he says, "diversity" is not the answer. "Underrepresentation is really the component that is killing this nation. People tend to turn diversity into a catchall," he says. Diversity statistics, which end up counting Nigerian students just like black students from Harlem, can sometimes hide the problem. Just having different-colored skin in the room is not enough, he says.

The focus must be on the people who are underrepresented in higher education -- mainly black, Hispanic, and American Indian students.

He tells the Chevron crowd about the university president who recently said that if getting more Hispanic professors was difficult, "Why not just go to Mexico and hire them?" That's simply not the point, Mr. Tapia says. "How does the Argentinian aristocrat understand any of what I had to go through in the barrio?"

In private he can be blunt, but publicly he praises nearly everyone for asking good questions and making good points. One of the chemical engineers, a Venezuelan, takes issue with Mr. Tapia's argument, saying that none of the South American scientists he knows came from the upper class. Mr. Tapia acknowledges that point but doesn't budge from his argument. "I'm not against helping the world," he says. "But I'm for helping ourselves first."

Later, as he climbs back into his van, he says: "I always step on someone's toes when I say that. Always. He didn't look Hispanic, but as soon as he started speaking and I heard his accent, I said, 'Uh-oh, here it comes.'"

Like the 1959 race with the Green Monster, sometimes the contest isn't quite what you think it is. Sometimes the real issue evades your focus. It's not about being the fastest. It's about being the quickest. It's not about diversity. It's about the plight of certain minority groups in the country. It's a point Mr. Tapia reiterates again and again: "I don't want our diversity to be a poet from Chile."

Making Mufflers

For Mr. Tapia, the route from a Los Angeles barrio to a corner office at an elite private university began with cars. The turning point, though, had little to do with dragsters. Instead, it was much more mundane: the hot, dusty yard of a muffler factory in Southern California.

It was there that the 18-year-old Richard Tapia got a job the summer after graduating from high school, in 1957. He spent weeks outside, building mufflers and breaking out in rashes from the fiberglass he was stuffing into them. He hammered and welded the mufflers tight, 400 times a day.

All the while, a 45-year-old factory worker named Jim regaled him with tales of his Mississippi home sprinkled with advice about life. "You're smart," Jim told him. "You should go to college." And so he did.

But, as the son of Mexican immigrants who knew education was important but did not know how to pursue it, he didn't really understand his options, he says. So he enrolled at Harbor Community College, now Los Angeles Harbor College, in Wilmington, Calif. Professors there spotted his math ability and encouraged him to attend the University of California at Los Angeles. He earned his bachelor's degree at UCLA in 1961 and worked first as a mathematician on ship design at a shipyard in San Pedro. Within two years, he was back at UCLA, in graduate school. "I didn't want to go to graduate school," he says. "But my friends were all going, and I knew I was smarter than they were."

His field became optimization, a practical aspect of computational mathematics that Mr. Tapia describes now as simply "about finding the best in a group of things."

After getting his Ph.D., in 1967, he took a job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1970, he left for Houston and an assistant professorship at Rice.

And two years later, at age 33, he was tenured. In another four years -- just nine after leaving UCLA -- he was a full professor. "It was probably too fast," he admits now.

There's something quintessentially American in his story of a life transformed. His parents had immigrated from Mexico as teenagers. His father worked in a plant nursery, running it while the Japanese owners were in internment camps during the Second World War. A single generation later, the son was settled into a stable life in Houston, one wife, two kids, a professional career that he loved.

A Reflection

Mr. Tapia now says his students don't seem so different from him. "I see myself in all these students," he says. "I knew I was smart, but I didn't have the credentials. I didn't know how to navigate the waters."

At Rice, he has supervised 37 Ph.D. students. Sixteen of them have been women, and 13 have been underrepresented-minority students. They now work at a range of places, including Sandia National Laboratory, Northwestern University, and Texas Instruments. "We've had successes where other people wouldn't have found them," he says. "We're not taking students that could have gotten into Stanford or Princeton. We've expanded the pool."

Among the programs Mr. Tapia directs is the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate. Financed by the National Science Foundation, it provides stipends for minority graduate students and allows undergraduates to spend summers doing research with professors. The program, which draws students from various science and engineering fields, creates a critical mass of minority students who can support one another.

But for all his success in advancing the cause of minority students, he still has to prod to get results.

A few years ago, he says, his department received 10 graduate applications from underrepresented minority students. None were admitted.

Although Mr. Tapia was not serving on the admissions committee, he often read through all the applications -- something professors in the department are permitted to do. "I try to be a safeguard person," he says. "Let's look at the rejects and ask the committee why they were rejected."

At the time, he told the committee members, "You would have rejected me," citing his community-college background and his good but not stellar grades. "They say, 'Oh no, we would have seen something in your application.'"

He told them: "I had nothing better than this student you just turned down." And he implored them to look at more than grades and test scores, to instead place the application in context and consider the letters of recommendation.

Liliana Borcea, an associate professor who served on the admissions committee then, says that as a native of Romania she was not as aware of the issues surrounding minority students in the United States. And she praises Mr. Tapia for his recruiting, but acknowledges that they did not always see eye to eye on admissions.

"I had a disagreement with him about some of the students," she says. "With some it turned out that I was wrong. With some it turned out that I was right."

In the end, Mr. Tapia agreed to support some of the students through his grants, and five minority students were accepted.

"If I hadn't intervened, we would have zero," he says. But it came at a cost. "I lost capital. It hurt friendships. People think I'm a pain in the ass or a hero."

Father Figure

More than 200 people had come to the Tapias' house on a Saturday in June. The gathering, two years ago, was to celebrate the 60th birthday of his wife, Jean.

The couple married when he was an undergraduate at UCLA, and over the years, the simple ranch home they bought when they moved to Houston has played host to hundreds of gatherings. As part of his effort to make sure that minority graduate students have a network of support, he opens his home. The students come for summer barbecues, for Easter dinner, for Thanksgiving, for no reason at all. Years after graduating, some still send Jean cards on Mother's Day. The professor's son says many of his best friends over the years have been his father's students.

The family revels in the cross section invited to its parties. In attendance at Jean's birthday party were Rice's provost and president, faculty members, graduate students, neighbors, and the woman who cleans the house.

Throughout the party, several television screens showed a video that Mr. Tapia had put together for the occasion. It was a slide show, with his voice narrating glimpses of his wife's life. There were snippets of film showing her dancing, pictures of her in elaborate costumes, fliers from the dance studio she opened once they had moved to Texas.

All the while, at her 60th-birthday party, Jean watched from her wheelchair.

In 1977, she came down with multiple sclerosis. A year later, doctors added myasthenia gravis to the diagnosis. She had to give up the dance school. As if that weren't enough, in 1982, their daughter, Circee, then a student at Rice, was killed by a drunken driver.

The Tapias speak frankly now about all the personal trials, but in earlier years they were racked by depression. But Jean persevered. She started a fitness program for people with MS, made exercise videos, appeared on television, taught people how to fight their deteriorating bodies. The birthday video featured clips of all of those efforts. And over it, guests heard Mr. Tapia explain what his wife had taught everyone: "You give up or you keep going."

After Circee's death, his wife encouraged him to get back into cars, something he had left behind when they moved from California. But dragsters are not a viable hobby anymore. So he started restoring cars and competing at car shows.

He once spent nearly a year wooing the owner of a '57 Chevy who wanted to be sure it went to a good home. Now he uses the cars and racing in his speeches, explaining how mathematics -- from the simple to the complex -- can help solve real-world problems.

Me and the President

"The body of Jim Crow is still warm," says Malcolm Gillis, Rice's president. "There are still adverse implications of centuries of slavery and then Jim Crow that make the playing field unlevel."

Mr. Gillis, a white Southerner from the Florida panhandle, speaks as passionately as Mr. Tapia about reaching out to minority students. He feels a certain kinship with the professor -- "like we were separated at birth," he says. The two speak regularly, and Jean Tapia refers casually to her friend the president as "Bubba." In recent weeks, Mr. Tapia has suggested two new programs that the president agreed to: an award to honor faculty mentors and a presidential lecture series featuring diverse scholars.

Before going to the lunchtime speech at Chevron, Mr. Tapia meets with public-relations and fund-raising staffers who are planning the lecture series. He talks about how he wants the event publicized to play up the president's role, saying he is well aware that some Rice professors see him as constantly beating the drum for more minority participation in the sciences.

"I want to low-key me even though I played a major role," he tells them. "I want this to be part of Malcolm's legacy."

'Where Am I Needed?'

When he returns from Chevron, he meets with Donald Williams, a black student who is about to finish his Ph.D. "Get to the writing," Mr. Tapia tells him. "That's what you've got to do."

He can be just as blunt when talking about himself. He is willing, for instance, to be frank about how much his own status has helped him over the years. "If I weren't an underrepresented minority, I may not have been in the National Academy," he says. "I understand that."

And he is willing to acknowledge -- even when Mr. Gillis demurs -- that all his work on outreach has negatively affected his scholarship. "Absolutely," he says.

But the professor has few regrets. "Where am I most needed? Where am I the most unique? I could write three or four more good papers, but other people can write those papers," he says. "Late in my career, I'll go where I can do the most good."

A few hours earlier, Mr. Tapia met with a candidate for a faculty opening in his department. He did not know her, he says, but she told him that a turning point in her career had been a talk he gave in California years ago. "You've made a difference in my life," she told him. He says: "That's the reward."

In some ways, for Mr. Tapia, it's not about the research anymore. It's about who will do that research in the future. It's not about science. It's about the health of the nation. It's not the fastest car. It's the quickest.