Committed to diversity? Where's the evidence? - Special Report - Cover Story

Black Issues in Higher Education, Nov 27, 1997 by Karin Chenoweth, Ronald Roach, Joan Morgan, Eric St. John, Jamilah Evelyn, Gail Hagans Towns

An often-expressed apprehension within the Black community is that traditionally White institutions were never really committed to integration, diversity, or affirmative action. The fear was that many of these colleges undertook halfhearted minority student recruitment and retention efforts and occasional Black faculty/staff appointments while waiting for relief from conservative courts, legislatures and voters.

Given the recent legal legislative and political environment, that relief seems to have arrived.

Colleges can achieve their goals if real commitment exists - as seen by the fact that it is common for colleges to surpass multi-million dollar fundraising campaigns.

The issue of whether there ever was real commitment for access and equity, however, remains. And, of course, there are many opportunities to demonstrate and prove it.

What follows is a small representative sample of actions and activities that transcend rhetorical commitment. This sample is by no means definitive or exhaustive, but it shows that there remains individual and institutional commitment that has weathered the current storm. We will all find out in the next few years if this commitment will reverse, or move forward.

Engineering Diversity

African American and Hispanic students can be hard to find in engineering and the hard sciences, particularly at the graduate level. That is one reason why Georgia Institute of Technology stands out.

Georgia Tech confers more graduate degrees in engineering on African American students than any other institution, and is second only to Stanford in conferring master's degrees on Hispanic students. Only historically Black colleges confer more bachelor's degrees in engineering and computer sciences on African Americans than Georgia Tech. (Those HBCUs are: North Carolina A&T, Florida A&M, Prairie View A&M, Tuskegee and Southern Universities.)

And Georgia Tech has done a great deal to bring women into the traditionally male field of engineering as well, conferring more engineering degrees on women than any other institution.

Georgia Tech doesn't boast a large number of programs aimed at minority students, but the programs it has are very successful at enlarging the traditional pool of applicants and in boosting student performance.

For example, it has a three-two program that allows students to combine three years of a liberal arts college program with a technical degree. Students in the three-two program spend three years at another state college or one of the historically Black Atlanta University Center colleges - Morehouse, Spelman, Clark Atlanta, or Morris Brown - and finish up with two years at Georgia Tech. The Atlanta University Center sends between 125 and 150 students a year to Georgia Tech, and the dual degree students - as they are called - are supported with special orientation and social programs. Georgia Tech. also recruits graduate students from historically Black schools such as Prairie View A&M University in Texas. Additionally, it recruits high school students from around the state - watching such indicators as the PSAT, the SAT, the National AChievement tests and grade point averages.

A few years ago, Georgia Tech revamped its Challenge program. What was once a traditional remediation program for minority students aimed at eliminating educational deficits is now a highly challenging accelerated summer program. Within a couple of years, the performance of Challenge students went up so high - more minority students achieved 4.0 averages than ever before - that some White students demanded entry into the class as well.

As a result of its efforts to enlarge the pool of African American and Hispanic students who apply and attend Georgia Tech, it is making a bid to become one of the important routes for minorities on the way to careers in engineering.

School: Georgia Institute of Technology, public Location: Atlanta, Georgia Undergraduate Enrollment: 9,469 Men: 72% Women: 28% African American: 10% Hispanic: 4% Native American: 1% Asian or Pacific Islander: 12% Cost: $7,245 (in state tuition plus room and board)

Framing Diversity in Global Terms

As the incoming president of Dillard University, Dr. Michael Lomax has inherited an institution that has made impressive strides at creating programs of diversity. That's because the previous president, Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook, launched initiatives that have brought worldwide recognition to the small, historically Black university.

The school's National Center for Black-Jewish Relations - the only one of its kind in the United States - has hosted eight annual national conferences on Black-Jewish relations since the center was founded in 1989. The conferences have brought together community leaders and scholars to assess strategies and initiatives to improve relations between the two groups.

Dillard also is the only historically Black institution to have an undergraduate Japanese Studies program. Each summer, dozens of Japanese high school students come to Dillard for intensive English language studies which draw heavily upon African American literature to enrich the learning of the foreign students.