A cheerful seasoned journalist and professor sits in his office in the Manship School of Mass Communication, as a young chemistry professor with affable dreadlocks sits in his Chemistry Department office on the other side of campus.The two men have something in common — both are accomplished black educators visiting the University for the fall semester through the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Visiting Professor Program.William Slater and John Harkless are the fourth and fifth participants in the program respectivly, which began in spring 2007 to advance the black faculty and graduate student presence on campus. The program aims to diversify faculty, provide for relationships between the University and historically black institutions and encourage minority undergraduates to consider the University for graduate school.Slater served as a dean of journalism and fine arts colleges at four universities and most recently stepped down as the dean of the College of Communication at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. He will return to TCU as a political communication professor after his stay at LSU.Slater said as a professor he works in a less pressurized environment than as dean.”I don’t have to wear a tie anymore. I cannot remember the last time I actually took a vacation,” he said. “Boy, what I’m going to do is vegetate. I may not shave for a month.”As a journalist, Slater’s jobs included stints as a White House reporter and a news anchor in Boston. He has also written and produced award-winning documentaries.WBZ-TV in Boston needed a black reporter to cover the ongoing riots in the area in the late 1960s, and Slater took the job.”Everywhere I went there were riots,” he said. But he said racial tensions were never directed toward him.Slater grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and after he completed prep school, he was the only graduate out of 40 not to enroll in college. He was working at the Boston TV station before he decided to attend Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Slater’s specialty is political communication, and his desk sits in front of a shelf stocked with books by Manship political communication chairman Bob Mann, his hallway neighbor in the Journalism Building.”I wanted the opportunity to spend time with some of the faculty who specialize in political communication,” Slater said. “I knew LSU had a great program.”Slater teaches a media writing course and an upperclassman diversity course where students analyze diversity issues through comics and political cartoons. He also advises students, serves as the Reilly Fellow for the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs and other committees and aids the school in minority recruitment.  “The impression I get is LSU is trying very hard,” Slater said of diversity recruitment. “There’s no lack of effort.” Though TCU is not a “historically black university,” Slater joined LSU’s program because he felt he could help attract minority students. When Harkless and his 16-year-old cat Essence arrived in Baton Rouge for the beginning of the semester, he said he stayed with his cousin to learn the layout of the city before moving to his own apartment.The 36-year-old Jackson, Miss., native is a chemistry professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.Harkless teaches one graduate class at LSU where students explore physical chemistry possibilities through computational models instead of extensive chemical experiments — a course he developed at Howard.”I’ve really been deep in the nerdity,” Harkless joked of his time at LSU. “I haven’t gone to many restaurants.” Harkless said he spends most of his time at LSU researching and carrying out calculations of his own on the Supermike supercomputer — the 11th fastest system in the world.”You guys have an obscene amount of computers I can use to do research,” he said.Harkless said Howard University is 90 percent black and has a high diversity rate. But he said LSU’s Chemistry Department, with a faculty of African-Americans, Africans, New Zealanders and Indians, is much larger and more diverse. Harkless said LSU effectively recruits black students to stay for graduate studies. He said at the University of California-Berkeley, there were three black students in his academic area out of nearly 200 when he attended graduate school.Harkless said Americans are turning away from hard sciences like chemistry, and blacks are poorly represented in higher levels of the field with less than 1 percent.Harkless recently handed out recruiting materials to prospective students of the Chemistry Department. He said the visibility of his success in the field to potential graduate students is meaningful.”As you cultivate more people as living examples, you cultivate more faculty … you’re going to build things to a point where someone like me isn’t that remarkable in terms of demographics,” Harkless said.—-Contact Sarah Lawson at [email protected]