Diversifying LBJ's Legacy

Black Issues in Higher Education, March 18, 1999 by Jamilah Evelyn

The dean of the University of Texas' Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs strives to ensure that the school's graduates reflect the diversity of the public they eventually will serve.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Dr. Edwin Dorn is standing on top of the Lyndon Baines Johnson library at the University of Texas-Austin, pointing out the vast differences between the city's east and west sides.

"I-35 runs through the center of the city," he says, "and divides it between the predominantly Black and Hispanic populations on the east side and the overwhelmingly Anglo populations on the west side.

"That has, discouragingly, not changed much in the last 30 years," he says.

And that's not the only thing that hasn't changed.

"Thirty years ago, for example, the University of Texas was debating whether Blacks should play on the UT football team," he recalled during a speech he gave at a Texas state NAACP convention.

Dorn remembers because he got his undergraduate degree here -- and Phi Beta Kappa honors -- just over three decades ago. He participated in some of those debates on whether. the university could maintain quality and diversity at the same time. Surreptitiously, he also notes that he drank his first beer here -- legally -- voted in his first congressional election and partook in his first protest demonstration.

Now the Houston native sits at the helm of the university's LBJ School of Public Affairs. These days, it's not Black football players who are causing all the commotion, but rather the Black and Latino students who have been denied admittance to the university's prestigious law school. Still, the old nagging question has come up again: How can the university maintain diversity and quality at the same time?

While less publicly scrutinized at the school of public affairs, diversity is nonetheless an issue Dorn grapples with as the first Black dean to head this nationally recognized think tank. LBJ has only one Black faculty member -- there have been only two in the school's nearly 30-year history -- three Latinos, and roughly a 20-percent minority student population. Dorn says he's interested in having the school not only harvest public servants who look like the public they serve, but also in having it employ qualified, diverse scholars who explore topics relevant to the communities that finance their paychecks.

With less than two years under his belt as the dean, Dorn says he's still settling into his new role. But he says he knows he's got a program to shape, perhaps some in-class teaching to do, future leaders to mold, and some legacies to uphold.

Prepared for Battle

On the back of Dorn's door hangs a crisp, white shirt and an olive flight jacket festooned with patches representing military air units. It's a memento from his four-year stint in the Pentagon overseeing recruitment, training, and pay benefits for America's largest workforce.

The dean admits that he's never worn the jacket. Nonetheless, the jacket, the bald-eagle flag dangling near the window, and the presidential commendations showcased beside the book shelf make the office look more like one belonging to a government official ready for combat than to a graduate school dean.

Yet, in Texas -- where the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court's Hopwood ruling outlawed affirmative action at the state's public institutions -- it seems logical that anyone with a diversity agenda might need a warrior's mindset.

Dorn dismisses the idea that he may have been tapped for the deanship partly because of his success with recruiting one of the nation's most diverse talent pools for the U.S. military. But he readily professes that if that's an area that he can help improve at the university, he's eager to do so.

"It's one of my responsibilities as dean of the LBJ school," he says in his soft, mellow voice. "We are trying to produce men and women who will shape the public's business for the next generation or so, and my view is that the people who serve the public ought to look more like the public they serve. This is a state that within the next decade or so will become majority minority. We need to move the public servants more in that direction."

Doing that, he says, really isn't so hard. While he notes that the military actively and unabashedly engages in affirmative action, he says he can draw from some of their same techniques while operating within the confines of the legal parameters he's forced to comply with.

"Part of it is the lesson I drew from the military experience," he says. "How does the military manage to have such a diverse and high-quality force? Through highly aggressive recruiting. By a recognition that if you confine your recruiting to a very narrow pool of people, you're not going to get the diversity or the quality that you need in the force.

"Similarly, we have to recruit very aggressively here -- for graduate students as well as for faculty. If all we do is recruit around the state of Texas at the major universities, we are not going to achieve the diverse student body we want. That's why we try to recruit as aggressively as we can in say, Atlanta -- at Spelman and Morehouse," he continues.