Coming to grips with the problems of race - interview with Council for Aid to Education's Commission on National Investment in Higher Education co-chair Thomas Kean - Interview

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 10, 1997

In addition to serving as a co-chair of the Council for Aid to Education's Commission on National Investment in Higher Education (CNIHE), Thomas Kean, president of Drew University and former governor of New Jersey, was recently appointed to the president's newly formed advisory commission on race. Following the CNIHE press conference, Gov. Kean discussed the report and the advisory commission with Black Issues In Higher Education:

What is the key thing you'd like the President and Congress to take from this [CNIHE] report on higher education?

The key thing that I'd like them to understand is that if we continue to do things [on a] business as usual [basis], hundreds and thousands of their constituents are going to be denied the right to a college education.

Is there a connection between your position on the race advisory board and this report?

The most dramatic tie is [that] the people who are going to be left out [of participation in college] first are people who are Black, people who are Hispanic, people who are poor. So if these trends continue, the divide between rich and poor, Black and white is going to widen. And so the social contract, the social fabric of this country is going to be much more difficult to maintain.

How do you see linking the results of the study to the task you will have on the advisory board on race?

I happen to believe that we will never solve the problems of race in this country, which is so tied up with the right to opportunity, without looking at our young people and looking at our education system in a major way. And that starts with K through 12 [kindergarten through twelfth grade], and goes right into the recommendations we make in this report. Many of our problems with race are because we have denied opportunity to people in this country. We cannot continue to do that. The doorway to opportunity is education and if we don't address education in our final recommendation to the President, I don't think we will have done our jobs.

Were you surprised to be nominated to the advisory board by President Clinton?

Yes, I was. I was surprised because I was basically retired from public life. I had done some commission work and I'm chairman of the Carnegie Commission, but I have not been involved in public roles. I have not run for anything. I don't want to run for anything. So I was surprised that he selected me, and in fact, I turned him down until he came back and said, "I really want you," and [told me] the reasons he wanted me.

One of the reasons he cited was that I've been governor of the second-most diverse state in the country. I dealt with a number of issues while I was governor. I appointed more minorities than any governor in the history of the state. I was the first governor to deal with the South African problems. And when I ran for reelection as a Republican, I got well over 60 percent of the minority vote, which is unusual for a Republican.

[Aside] from the point of view of having dealt with the problems as a governor, I'm now a foundation president and we're dealing with a number of these issues at the Carnegie Corporation. And as a university president, because race is always an omnipresent subject on campuses and, as every college president has, we've dealt with problems on campus and understand the nature of those problems.

What do you think will be the greatest challenge for the advisory board on race and why?

I think our challenge is first of all to get the dialogue started properly and not have people run off on side issues or be diverted by anything. [Our challenge is] to get into the serious issues which involve not only those of us who may have been talking about race for some time, but involve people in a bipartisan way - [to] get [to] people in some institutions who have not really focused on race; to get the country as a whole recognizing that we are not going to be the kind of country we want to be unless we finally come to grips with the most difficult problem that has affected this democracy since our constitutional convention. Unless we come to grips with it, we're not going to succeed as a nation in the next century. And the president put it very well. He said we can decide to live with people just like us. We can go into little enclaves and that's very easy to do. But we lose something when we do that as a people, and the nation loses a great deal. And this diverse democracy will never be able to realize its full potential unless we come to grips with the problems.

What's the biggest challenge of ensuring diversity at Drew University in your role as president?

We have a diverse student body because partly we're in a location where people from cities can come to us. We're the best institution near a city. We're near Newark. We're near East Orange. We're near Jersey City. We're near Paterson. And we're near New York, for that matter. So a diverse student body hasn't been our problem.

Having a diverse faculty has been more of a problem because there are not enough minority candidates in a number of fields out there. And often, some of the richer universities have first crack at those people. Getting a more diverse faculty has been a challenge.