This research-in-progress examines the path to becoming and remaining an African-American professor in the information systems field from both a student and faculty perspective. This work builds upon the efforts of The PhD Project to increase the number of minority faculty members in business programs with specific focus on IS. It proposes a mixed-methods approach combining structured interview questions with a quantitative survey to better understand the factors affecting undergraduate students’ aspirations to academia and what makes African Americans stay in academia once there.