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Weathering the stormFebruary 24, 2005
[Editor’s Note: Part 3 in a 4-part series addressing the integration and history of blacks at the university]
Len Bias strode to the podium, a beaming 22-year-old dressed in a white
suit, white shirt and black tie who had averaged more than 20 points a
game for the Terrapin men’s basketball team in the 1986 season. He had
just been selected second overall by the best team in basketball —the
Boston Celtics, where he’d play alongside legend Larry Bird — and was
destined for fame and fortune.
Less than two days later he would drop dead from a cocaine-induced
heart attack suffered just hours after the greatest moment of his life.
When the dust cleared, legendary basketball coach Lefty Driesell and
his successor Bob Wade, along with athletics director Dick Dull, were
ousted amid scandals. There were few people left standing.
But one of the central figures criticized in the ordeal would leave on
his own terms. Almost two years later, the university’s first black
president, John B. Slaughter, announced he was leaving the university
for Occidental College — a small, almost all-white college outside of
Los Angeles.
Though Slaughter’s term is largely remembered for the Bias controversy,
it was also an important step in the university’s racial progression —
after denying blacks admission to the university for more than 100
years, the school was not only seeing an increase in undergraduate
minority enrollment, but it had become one of the first historically
white universities to be headed by a black leader.
Slaughter’s successor, Brit Kirwan, would continue to push for
increased diversity, but a lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of
a scholarship for black students would lead officials to make startling
revelations about the university’s past shortcomings.
‘SACK SLAUGHTER’
John Brooks Slaughter was a 48-year-old Kansas-born engineer with two
decades of research experience when the nation’s seventh-largest public
university came calling. Appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the
first black leader of the National Science Foundation in Washington,
the soft-spoken, low-profile Slaughter left two years into his six-year
term to take over this university — a black academic leading a
sports-heavy campus with just a 7 percent black undergraduate class.
“He was the first black to head a traditionally white university — a
big deal,” said George Callcott, a university historian and history
professor emeritus. “And the interesting thing is how Slaughter was
accepted. Nobody at College Park thought this was unusual … They were
praised for reaching out to this very able educator.”
Slaughter quickly reinforced the praise with four productive years. The
academic standards were improving, and he was named head of the
now-disbanded NCAA Presidents Commission. He continued the improved
minority recruiting of his predecessors, Charles Bishop and Robert
Gluckstern.
Then all hell broke lose.
Bias flew in with his father from New York — the site of the NBA draft
— and went to his family home in Landover, according to The Washington
Post. He arrived in College Park around midnight, where he ate crabs in
his Washington Hall dorm until 2 a.m.
He drove off alone, was seen at an off-campus gathering and returned to
his dorm about 3 a.m. He collapsed after 6 a.m. while talking to a
teammate.
Two days later, Bias was dead.
The university was immediately under a national spotlight. A series of
oversights — including players using drugs and flunking out — were
uncovered, and the beloved Driesell stepped down. There were calls for
Slaughter to resign, something he agreed to do if he had to.
“Here was one of the few black executive officers of a major university
campus about to bite the dust, it seemed, because he had not kept a
close enough eye on his sports program,” lamented Post columnist
Courtland Milloy.
Just two days later, Slaughter hired Bob Wade — a wildly successful
high school coach with no college experience — to replace Driesell.
Wade, who is black, was the only candidate interviewed, and the alumni
boosters were not pleased. In short, he was destined for failure.
Slaughter received racist hate mail daily. At a men’s football game, a
group hired a plane to fly a banner over Byrd Stadium. “Sack
Slaughter,” it read.
“There was resistance to having a black coach in the first place, but
the way he did it gave them further ammunition,” said Cordell Black,
associate provost for equity and diversity. “Racism wasn’t dead,” added
Callcott.
Athletics were overshadowing academics. At a time when black enrollment
was dropping nationwide, the university increased its black enrollment
by 17 percent. The number of faculty members rose by 170, 12 of whom
were black. The average SAT score increased from 982 to 1,032, and more
money was being directed toward graduate fellowships and faculty
research programs.
But the timing was right for his departure — both for him and for the
university, said William Sedlacek, an assistant director of the
Counseling Center who was close to Slaughter.
“He was a quiet, composed leader. Quiet, dignified and very smart guy
who knew what he wanted to do,” said Sedlacek, who has advocated racial
issues at the university since 1969. “Slaughter was cool — he waited
’til things died down a bit and then left. That was probably best for
all concerned.”
PROGRAM QUESTIONED
Current chancellor Kirwan — who served as provost under Slaughter — had
enough on his plate when he became president at the close of the 1980s.
Then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer and the General Assembly launched a
bold vision to make the university a top-tier research institution in
1988, but in just a few years, they slashed the university budget by 18
percent.
Then in 1990, a student from Baltimore County named Daniel Podberesky
enrolled at the university as a freshman and began applying for
scholarships. He met the requirements of the Benjamin Banneker
Scholarship Program except for one thing — he wasn’t black.
The Banneker scholarship was introduced in 1979 by then-Chancellor
Robert Gluckstern after the government threatened to withdraw $65
million from Maryland state colleges for allegedly failing to produce
adequate desegregation plans. It was designed for high-achieving black
students, giving them a four-year scholarship that included tuition,
room and board, mandatory fees and book allowances.
Born in Louisville, Ky., Kirwan grew up in the South and attended
segregated schools. From his first day as president, Kirwan listed
diversity among his top priorities.
“I can remember from my earliest recollections feeling how unjust
segregation was,” he said Tuesday. “I grew up with very strong
emotional feelings about the inequities in our society created by race
and prejudice.”
The courtroom battle for Podberesky v. Kirwan was a strange reversal.
To prove the program was necessary, the university and state argued the
university was so hostile toward blacks that such a program needed to
exist.
On the other side of the room, the plaintiffs told the judge the
university was doing an admirable job in graduating black students and
didn’t need race-exclusive scholarships.
“It was hard,” said Susan Bayly, general counsel for the university.
“Here the university was trying to desegregate and attract
high-achieving minorities, and we say, ‘This is a terrible place to
come, it’s got a hostile atmosphere, an underrepresentation of African
Americans, they don’t stay here and they don’t graduate.’”
“Some said you’re going to cause yourself harm, you’ll have to admit to
your failings,” Kirwan said. “But it just seemed to me that that was
the honest thing to do, because we were far from where we thought we
should be.”
‘CHILLY CLIMATE’
Just a few years earlier, then-Special Assistant to the President Ray
Gillian made the same conclusions in a 1989 report to the president
called “Access is not Enough.” In it, Gillian, now associate provost
and director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action
Programs at Johns Hopkins University, said he sought to explain to the
administration the “chilly climate for blacks” he saw on the campus.
“I was not surprised, and that was part of the intent of the report,”
said Gillian when contacted recently. “I think initially people were
sort of shocked and didn’t want to accept that was the experience.”
“Tensions are running high between black students and white students,”
he observed in the report. “Black students are getting tired of racial
slurs in the hallways and hollering of racial slurs out of windows.”
Black students believed they had to prove they were in college to
study, and were afraid to speak up in class “so as not to appear
arrogant.”
While the university was ranked among the top three public research
universities or its diversity in terms of black undergraduate and
graduate enrollments, Gillian believed that was more others’
shortcoming than praise of the university.
The university compiled a similar report to defend Banneker, calling
the university’s system “at best neglectful, at worst hostile.”
The report said the university had a reputation as “all-white:” “too
little changed from the days of segregation, and one that can still
present an unwelcoming environment for African Americans. … Past
discrimination has resulted in attitudes among some members of the
campus community that adversely affect recruitment, retention and
graduation of African American students. This is unacceptable.”
The Banneker program helped to alleviate these problems, Kirwan said.
“When the best student in a high school came here, it sort of sent a
signal that it’s OK to go to the University of Maryland,” said Kirwan,
who participated in a campus vigil supporting the program.
But attorney Richard A. Samp, chief counsel for the Washington Legal
Foundation — a conservative public interest law firm representing
Podberesky — said it came at the expense of white students.
“The university is now trying to discriminate in favor of blacks,” he
told The Washington Post in 1993, saying blacks benefited from the
hundreds of programs favoring them. “It doesn’t matter what kind of
discrimination existed in the past. What matters is what exists now.”
BEGINNING OF THE END
The university won the Banneker case twice in district court, but lost
both appeals in the circuit court. A three-judge panel unanimously
acknowledged racism existed on the campus but said the university had
failed to tailor the program to correct past discrimination. A request
to have the Supreme Court decide was shot down.
It was the first program of its kind to be declared unconstitutional.
But while the university could not use race-exclusive scholarships,
race could still be a factor.
“When the rest of the country saw what the university went through and
how difficult it was going to be to justify a race-exclusive
scholarship, the rest of the country began to rethink race-exclusive
programs,” Bayly said. “This was sort of the beginning of the end of
affirmative action with respect to race-exclusive programs.
“It was a terrible time, a terrible blow for the school, but the silver
lining was … while we couldn’t use race as an exclusive factor in
awarding or admitting students, we could use it as one of many
factors,” Bayly said.
The university combined the Banneker scholarship with the Francis Scott
Key scholarship into the Robert L. Gluckstern Banneker/Key scholarship
and opened it to all races.
While it wasn’t clear at the time whether it would hold up, the
university adopted the rationale of a 1978 Supreme Court ruling — the
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which recognized
diversity as a compelling justification for race-sensitive — but not
race-exclusive — programs.
Officials would hold their breath as these policies were challenged at
the University of Michigan, but today, the university has one of the
highest number of blacks receiving bachelor’s degrees among major
research institutions, and the university is routinely praised for its
diversity.
Tomorrow: The final installment explores the current state of the
university, with officials and students weighing in on what will define
the university in the next decades.
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