TEAM-UP’s Recommendations on Systemic Change

The TEAM-UP report identifies the structural and systemic causes explaining why African Americans have not experienced the growth in bachelor’s degrees in physics the way they have in other fields or as other minority groups have experienced in physics over the past two decades. Solving these problems requires changing not only the way physicists train students, but how they think about training students. Research on change in higher education suggests the need for physicists and astronomers to recognize and question the norms, values, and culture of their fields. The TEAM-UP report’s highest priority recommendations provide a guide to cultural transformation in the profession. The evidence and theories presented in this report call for a new way of thinking by physicists, much as the Davisson-Germer experiment did nearly a century ago.