LSU Officials Seek to Boost Minority Enrollment in Baton Rouge - Brief Article

Black Issues in Higher Education, August 3, 2000

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Under pressure from a federal judge, Louisiana State University officials are implementing a five-year plan to boost the percentage of Black students and teachers at its Baton Rouge campus.

"As a university with a legacy of exclusion of our state's African American citizens, who comprise 31 percent of Louisiana's population, we must do better. And we will," Dr. Mark Emmert, chancellor, and Dr. Dan Fogel, provost, said in a memo distributed on the campus.

By 2005, university officials intend to increase Black student enrollment by 20 percent, from 2,852 last fall to 3,407 out of more than 30,000 students total. The number of full-time Black professors should rise by 73 percent, from 30 last fall to 52, officials say.

The move follows a critical report from a federal court team monitoring compliance with a 1995 desegregation agreement affecting the state's public colleges.

The panel, consisting of veteran out-of-state educators, reports to U.S. District Judge Charles Schwartz Jr., and was created to track the state's compliance with the settlement of a decades-old desegregation lawsuit.

Enrollment and hiring data in the latest federal compliance report showed minimal progress in other-race recruitment since 1995.

At predominantly White four-year colleges, 90 percent or more of the full-time faculty is White, the report found.

At four-year Black colleges, Blacks represented between 61 percent and 70 percent of the teaching staff. LSU-Baton Rouge's percentage of Black students has increased less than 1 percentage point in the past five years, and it's still less than 10 percent of the total student body.

Officials envision a beefed-up recruitment effort in predominantly Black high schools, including early identification of high academic achievers, says Dr. Greg Vincent, vice provost for campus diversity.