Making minorities a permanent presence

Last fall, University President Judith Rodin announced financial initiatives for recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities, but has anything happened since then? One year after University President Judith Rodin announced financial initiatives aimed at increasing the underrepresented minority presence on campus, administrators say they are satisfied with the progress made toward the programs' long-term goals. But students and faculty emphasize the need for more work before the plan can be deemed a success. In the September 1996 Almanac, Rodin outlined four new financial programs designed to enhance the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minority faculty, staff and students: · A central allocation of $1 million a year for the next five years towards recruitment and retention; · A $20 million fundraising effort to create an endowment for recruitment and retention; · An effort to secure $250,000 in foundation funding for faculty and student research on the educational benefits of diversity in a university setting; · And the appointment of a standing faculty member to monitor and report to Rodin on progress made on the other three initiatives. The last initiative was abandoned after African-American and Latino faculty argued that central responsibility for minority recruitment and retention could not be fairly assigned to a single individual. Instead, the faculty recommended that deans, department chairpersons, faculty and students actively take on the responsibility of overseeing the programs. The University is already seeing the direct results of the various efforts. In the past year, the combined number of African-American, Latino and Native-American professors has increased by 24 percent, with the addition of four new black faculty members and three new Latino faculty members on campus. Such progress, Rodin noted, "did not happen by accident." Much of the central allocation of $1 million was used to increase the hiring packages offered to the new faculty, who were also heavily recruited by other universities. The admissions office also received additional funding to use in student recruitment. But despite the efforts, many faculty emphasize that such initiatives are only the first steps toward substantially increasing the minority presence on campus. Legal Studies Professor Kenneth Shropshire, who has been engaged in continual dialogue with Rodin and several other faculty members, characterized the plan as an initiative that will eventually make Penn an attractive place for minorities, drawing top-flight professors and students. But while he applauded this year's increase in the underrepresented minority student and faculty population, Shropshire noted that he is the only tenured black member of the Wharton School's 190-person faculty. "For the number one business school in the nation, that's an abysmal number," he said. Board of Overseers member and Education Professor Margaret Beale Spencer, another faculty member included in the discussions with Rodin, said the meetings have been productive and "moving in the right direction." She expects an agreement on faculty recruitment and retention initiatives within six weeks. But other faculty members said they were discouraged at not having been asked to participate in the talks. Jerry Johnson, tri-chairperson of the African American Association for Faculty, Staff and Administrators, said his organization wasn't included in the discussion or organization stages of the plan. "So we decided to wait and see what was going to happen with the plan," said Johnson, a professor in the Medical School. "I recently asked the provost on what had been done with the [$1 million] to date. I got no answer." Provost Stanley Chodorow said he has discussed minority funding and programming with faculty from the underrepresented minority groups, adding that Johnson was present at several of the meetings and participated in the discussion. "The initiatives are complex and our discussions about them with faculty members are ongoing," Chodorow added. "It is fair to say that our commitment to minority recruitment and retention is substantial. The president and I continue to invite good proposals on how to spend the additional minority recruitment and retention funding that we have committed." Johnson, nonetheless, described the plan as short-sighted and anemic. "One million dollars every year is simply not enough to go around between students and faculty," he said. "If the University takes this issue seriously, it should disengage faculty issues from the student issues." The AAA has also voiced concerns about the plan's grouping of underrepresented minorities into one category. Johnson said this may hide the fact that the number of African Americans may be decreasing while other minority groups may be increasing. "It's not clear," he said. "This could be a redistribution process rather than a supplementary process." Additional controversy surrounding the plan stems from the fact that Asian-American interests are not included. Because Asian Americans constitute approximately 17 percent of the University student body, and 23 percent of undergraduates, the administration does not consider them part of an underrepresented group. But Rodin said that the University also continues to make progress recruiting and retaining Asian Americans. She attributed the arrival this fall of "ten new faculty of Asian decent" to these efforts. But Asian Pacific Student Coalition President Eric Lee, a Wharton senior, said the University needs to "take more care in differentiating individuals of Asian decent and Americans of Asian decent." The Asian-American population is specifically concerned with the recruitment and retention of Asian-American faculty members, not just ones of Asian decent, he said. "It is a feeling that the University conveniently reports numbers on our community in terms of Asian not necessarily Asian American, whereas information from other communities are reported in terms of African American, Latino American and Native American," Lee noted. "This also may be reflective of the resistance that the Asian-American community has faced in being acknowledged as Americans," he added. And Ankor Vora, the South Asian Society's United Minority Council representative, added that when administrators label something a "minority permanence plan," they should address everyone in the minority community. APSC's intention is not to take away from the funding aimed at the underrepresented minorities, but instead to lobby for additional funding for the Asian-American community. "We're trying to expand on the language of the plan," Lee said. "This plan has great potential." Rodin's release of the recruitment and retention plans last year came in part as a response to a national debate over affirmative action. She said she felt the need to "clearly reaffirm this University's strong commitment to diversity as something profoundly educational in itself," adding that the plan was designed to "breathe new life" into the University's efforts to recruit and retain students and faculty from consistently underrepresented groups. While Penn officials said they have fully recognized and supported the importance of diversity in education, other universities throughout the country continue to consider re-examining their affirmative action policies. Since the passing of California's Proposition 209, which outlawed race-based affirmative action in college admissions, only one black student has enrolled in the law school at the University of California at Berkeley. Based on merit alone, the school reported that its number of black students is expected to drop by more than 50 percent and the number of Latinos by 5 to 15 percent, while the number of Asians would rise by 15 to 25 percent. And in a freshman class of 6,500 at the University of Texas this year, only 150 are black -- a drop of 50 percent from last year. Black enrollment had fallen 81 percent in 1996 following a 1995 decision by the state university system's board of regents not to take race into account for college admissions. In response to the debate, Rodin, along with 62 other research university presidents of the American Association of University Schools, signed an August 1997 full-page advertisement in The New York Times urging schools to continue taking race and gender into account in admission decisions.