|
Page 4 of 4
Moving on from the past
Campus makes new diversity strides
February 28, 2005
[Editor’s note: Part 4 of a 4-part series addressing the integration and history of blacks at the university]
Just two years after coming to the university, Cordell Black was pondering his departure.
Black, who holds a doctorate in 17th century French literature from the
University of Michigan, arrived in 1979 and was frustrated by the poor
academic standards and low enrollment of minority students.
“You work hard to get a Ph.D., and you want some good students — you
want to learn from students, you want them to learn from you, and none
of that was happening,” Black said.
Those days are a distant memory for Black, now an associate provost for
equity and diversity. Today, the university ranks higher than any other
major research institution in the number of blacks earning bachelor’s
degrees, blowing away its peer institutions.
University officials see room for improvement, and will meet today to
decide how — if necessary — to update the university’s admission
policies and programs following the 2003 Supreme Court ruling that
upheld using race as a narrow factor in admissions.
“There’s been a profound change in terms of the kinds of students that
the university recruits today,” Black said. “We have students here in
significant numbers that can be competitive at any university. That’s a
wonderful feeling.”
The path to those results has been tumultuous — court-enforced
admissions of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, to the Civil Rights movement
and protests of the 1960s and ’70s, to the affirmative action of the
1980s and ’90s that was questioned by the nation’s highest courts —
which begs the question: What will characterize this era?
Trying to Fit In
The group on the popular website Thefacebook.com is called, “I Should
Have Gone to a Blacker College,” and it has more than 400 members.
“Have you ever had to call a friend of a friend of a friend to find
someone who can cornrow your hair? Do you ever get tired of explaining
to your roommate why Vaseline is so important to your every day life?
Do you ever see Howard’s band and then watch The Mighty Sound of
Maryland play ‘Chain Gang’ and feel ashamed? If so, then YOU should
have gone to a blacker college!” the group’s page reads.
While tongue-in-cheek, the statement does represent some of the
feelings of isolation many students at the university sympathize with.
Statistics touting the university’s diversity are all relative; while
the school may be tops among research universities, a 12 percent black
population is still paltry.
“I’ve been here for only a semester and I basically know or have seen
most of the black people on campus. In fact I see the same ones all the
time. I’ve been so deprived,” one student wrote on a message board.
Last Monday brought floods of prospective students to the campus, with
a dizzying number of tours criss-crossing the campus at once. In front
of Stamp Student Union, a black parent had broken from her group and
found the Black Student Union’s table, blaring rap music with signs
encouraging debate over the use of “the ‘n’ word.”
“She didn’t want her son to go here — she didn’t see any black people
‘till she came to our table,” said Desarie Board, a former vice
president for the BSU. “When I first got here, I thought there wasn’t a
lot of black students. You go to class, and you don’t see people who
look like you, so you get intimidated.”
William Sedlacek, an assistant director of the Counseling Center who
has done extensive research on racism in his 30-plus years at the
university, said officials need to recognize where students are coming
from when encouraging diversity. He uses the university’s various
highly touted honors programs as an example.
“Let’s try to look at it from the viewpoint of the person of color
coming to this campus,” he said. “It’s large, still mostly white.
They’re taking a risk by even coming here and trying to figure out how
to make it. On top of that, we want you to go into this unusual program.
“We know from research that African Americans need to find each other
and find a community that they’re comfortable in. If you break them out
and put them in smaller groups, you’re working against developing that
African-American community on campus.”
It’s a delicate trade-off balancing the natural need for community with the desire to have a diverse and integrated campus.
Hayward “Woody” Farrar, who was a vocal, activist BSU president in 1969
and now teaches history at Virginia Tech, suggested black students need
to stop self-segregating.
“I would go weeks at College Park without seeing another black student
… In a more diverse world, black students and white students and all
kinds need to go to school together and work together if they want to
be effective in the new world we’re going into,” said Farrar, 55.
That includes getting involved in campus activities.
“Black students themselves have got to engage themselves more. They
have to go out for The Diamondback, they have to go out for SGA, they
have to go out for fraternities. The doors are open, and the students
have got to walk through them. Black students can’t complain they’re
being discriminated against if they’re not there to be discriminated
against.”
It’s a difficult obstacle only the administration can solve, says BSU
President Hank Rawlerson, who is concerned with retention rates and
diversity credit courses that allow students to skirt learning about
other cultures.
“That’s our challenge now — finding how to live and learn together,” Provost Bill Destler said.
Statistically Speaking
Statistically, the university is in a league of its own. It’s ranked
among historically black institutions in terms of degrees awarded, well
ahead of all its historically white peers:
- Black enrollment steadily increased from virtually none in 1970 to a
pinnacle at 15 percent in the mid-1990s. It has essentially leveled off
since then, hovering around 12 percent.
- Black Issues in Higher Education consistently ranks the university
14th in the nation among both historically black colleges and all other
universities in blacks receiving bachelor’s degrees, which is in the
company of schools such as Temple University, Florida State University
and Chicago State University.
- The university’s peers lag well behind: In 2004, the University of
Michigan - Ann Arbor was 71st; the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign was 64th; the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill was 67th, while the University of California’s Berkeley and Los
Angeles campuses have not been ranked in the top 100 in the past three
years.
- The university ranks third among other top-50 public universities in
graduate degrees. Undergraduate and graduate degrees combined, the
university had 140 more black graduates (791) than its closest
competitor, Ohio State University (650).
And those numbers would be significantly better if not for the
university’s subpar retention rates — less than 60 percent of the
university’s black students graduate in six years. In contrast, the
University of California, Berkeley, which admits 300 less black
students than this university, saw almost 75 percent of them graduate
in six years.
“The graduation rate of our student body overall isn’t what any of us
think it should be,” University System of Maryland Chancellor Brit
Kirwan said. “It’s above 70 percent [overall] for the first time ever,
and we’ve seen a steady increase in the graduation rates of African
Americans, but it’s still not what it ought to be.”
Some say an improvement in the faculty and administrative ranks could
help improve retention rates — now that the students are here, the
university must find ways to get them involved on campus and hire
faculty and administrators to guide them.
The Provost’s office has three black administrators, but there is only
a handful of high-ranking blacks between the president’s office,
administrative affairs, student affairs, the Office of Information
Technology and research departments. Just one dean — Behavioral and
Social Sciences College head Edward Montgomery — is black.
“It’s a matter of changing the culture, in some departments,” Black said.
Scant Newsroom Diversity
While the university has been able to change, the student newspaper that covers it has had a tougher time.
In 1993, black students criticized the paper’s coverage as racially
insensitive, citing a fashion supplement in which only white models
appeared, mistakes in articles about Frederick Douglass and W. E. B.
DuBois and scant coverage of Black Student Union elections. In protest,
two female university students — one black, one Asian — stole 10,000
copies of the paper, leaving in its place a flier that said it was
unavailable “due to its racist nature.”
Articles in The Washington Post covering the theft pointed out that only two of The Diamondback’s 19 editors were black.
Today, none of The Diamondback’s 16 editors is black. There are no black staff writers.
In fact, while there is a “diversity” beat position on the staff, many
of the blacks working at The Diamondback in recent years have been
columnists and general assignment reporters.
In its history dating back to 1910, the paper has only had two black
editor-in-chiefs: Ivan Penn, who held the position in 1990-1991, and
Jayson Blair, the journalist whose plagiarism at The New York Times
brought great scrutiny to the university’s journalism school and its
policies.
The campus does have two other publications aimed specifically at
blacks, but both publish monthly and have small staffs and light
content.
The Diamondback’s open house last month yielded only a few prospective black journalists out of a room of more than 40.
“We have few minorities seeking out positions at the newspaper and
turnover rate at The Diamondback is incredibly high,” editor in chief
Jonathan Cribbs said. “Therefore, when we do have qualified minority
applicants, much like other people on our staff, they tend to leave
almost as quickly as they come in.”
Keeping Policies Up to Date
The university’s race-based Banneker scholarship were challenged and
subsequently struck down by the courts in 1994, so when the University
of Michigan’s point-based admissions policies were challenged,
university officials watched with a close eye.
To officials’ relief, the Supreme Court preserved affirmative action in
university admissions by a one-vote margin, with strong support of
racial diversity on college campuses in achieving social equality.
Important in the decision was Justice Lewis F. Powell’s controlling
opinion in the 1978 University of California Regents v. Bakke case,
which permitted the use of race in admissions and which the university
had been subscribing to. President Bush had asked the court to declare
the policies unconstitutional.
“If they had come out — had not approved the Powell theory, we and a
lot of others would have had to go back to the drawing board,”
university legal counsel Susan Bayly said. “These cases have really
shown that everything we did was justified in the law and educational
policy.”
Sedlacek said he isn’t satisfied with the university’s current
policies. He wants the university to once again be on the cutting edge
of diversity in higher education, calling the current policy “lawyers
playing it safe.”
“The lawyers want to know, ‘How can we play it safe,’ but in essence,
what the university has done over the years is not play it safe,” he
said.
Sedlacek said he will propose a more detailed system used by Oregon
State University and North Carolina State University, to name a few,
that looks at students beyond SAT scores and color, asking questions
about life experiences and level of ability to succeed at a large
school like College Park.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said in the Michigan ruling that 25 years
had passed since Bakke, and affirmative action should “no longer be
necessary” 25 years from now — something Kirwan awaits.
“I certainly hope the day will come where it is no longer necessary,
but I’m not sure if it will be in the next 20 [sic] years,” Kirwan
said.
|
Articles 
