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Report of the Residential College Commission
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| 1974 | 1976 | 1978 | 1980 | 1982 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black | 33 (2.7) | 40 (3.4) | 42 (3.8) | 31 (2.6) | 38 (3.4) |
| Hispanic | 5 (0.4) | 8 (0.7) | 12 (1.1) | 16 (1.3) | 20 (1.8) |
| Asian or Pacific Islander | 29 (2.4) | 35 (3.0) | 36 (3.2) | 42 (3.5) | 37 (3.3) |
| Native American | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 10 (0.9) |
| Non-Resident Alien | NA | 14 (1.2) | 10 (0.9) | 14 (1.2) | 43 (3.8) |
| Total Freshman | 1204 | 1170 | 1117 | 1213 | 1104 |
Despite these less than impressive numerical trends, the University of Rochester entered a new era marked by increased sensitivity to the needs and concerns of minority students, faculty and staff when Richard D. O'Brien became Provost in the summer of 1978. O'Brien made it clear from the beginning of his administrative tenure that in his judgment the University had to make significant new efforts and renewed commitments. "We are determined to increase the black presence at the University," he stated, "[so that we can achieve a situation where] blacks do not find themselves vastly outnumbered and where the viewpoints and cultures of minority and majority students can contribute to each other most effectively." He announced to the Faculty Senate on October 16, 1979 that he had formed a Council for Minority Education "made up primarily of the Associate Deans of the various colleges, Mr. Jefferson from the Office of Special Student Services, and Mr. France (because of his involvement with affirmative action action at the faculty hiring level) to examine the whole question of our stance with respect to minorities as students or as faculty."
Provost O'Brien took other initiatives as well: a Task Force on Affirmative Action formed in December, 1981; closer working relationships with black students in the Black Students Union, as members of the Provost's Undergraduate Council, and in several other organizational contexts; an Alumni Committee on Minority Enrollment which helped form a close working relationship with the Urban League and led to the creation of twenty special scholarships to help shift minority student recruitment from a New York State to a national basis and from "disadvantaged" to "highly qualified" status; a "Shared Resources Project" led by Dean of Students Peter Kountz which involved four professional staff of the Office of Special Student Services working for portions of each week in the offices of Admissions and Financial Aid, Academic Advising, and Career Services and Placement; a summer program for undergraduate minority students to work in biological laboratories in the Medical School and in the College of Arts and Science. Perhaps most important, in 1981 O'Brien helped recruit an outstanding black alumnus as a high ranking University officer, Bernard Gifford as Vice President for Student Affairs.
Gifford had been a graduate student in Biophysics at the University in the late sixties and early seventies, but while earning his doctorate he had also been active in black affairs both on campus and in the greater Rochester community. He was, in fact, involved with the Black Students Union and with the highly visible and effective FIGHT organization. In the seventies he won a postdoctoral fellowship to study public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, worked as a RAND consultant to the City of New York, and served as Deputy Chancellor of New York City's Board of Education. Calling Gifford's return to Rochester "a very promising addition to our community," Provost O'Brien looked to the new Vice President to provide significant leadership for the University's initiatives in minority affairs.
Gifford exercised leadership in several key areas. He recruited additional minority staff, as when he appointed Marion Walker, an African American UR alumnus from the class of 1974, to a new position as Director of Minority Affairs. He carefully studied minority student academic performance and designed a "Minority Peer Counseling Program" to help students make the academic and social adjustments necessary for success at the University. He also worked with Admissions to create a Frederick Douglass Scholar Program (deliberately parallel to the prestigious Joseph C. Wilson Scholar Program) to target "a select group of high performance minority students." In a September, 1982 presentation to the Faculty Senate, Gifford justified his emphasis on diversity in student recruitment on both bluntly pragmatic and highly principled grounds: "If one takes a hard look at demographic trends in areas from which we recruit most of our students, the numbers are quite scary. The number of white middle class high school seniors is falling at a precipitous rate. Unless the University is more successful in recruiting talented non-white students, the future is bleak. ... [in addition] diversity is a self-contained benefit ... [it] produces a healthier intellectual atmosphere for the entire University community, and is an objective worthy of our best efforts."
Gifford's most important leadership effort was his work on a major "Study of Race Relations at the University of Rochester," begun in 1982 and completed in March, 1983. Modelled on a study done a few years earlier at Harvard, the Race Relations project was based on a rigorous sampling of student opinion -- of all 331 minority students (Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American) and 35% of white undergraduates. The 53-page study (plus tables and appendices) demonstrated quantitatively what had previously been known only through high profile and high intensity anecdotal evidence: that considerable tension existed on campus between minority and non-minority students, particularly between black and white undergraduates. The study also focused on certain root causes of this tension: the overwhelming majority of white students came from neighborhoods and high schools that were predominantly white while 50-75% of Blacks and Hispanics came from predominantly minority neighborhoods and high schools. The study concluded:
... minority and non-minority freshmen may need an initial period for adjusting to each other. We suggest that the University take steps to aid in this adjustment. These steps could include promoting interracial interaction during freshman orientation and during the first few weeks of classes ... Resident advisors may be particularly useful for this purpose: we therefore recommend that they receive training in skills and techniques for promoting interracial interaction. Minority resident advisors may be particularly useful as role models for both minority and White freshmen; we therefore recommend that their number be increased.; Other recommendations included the following:
-- "the University offer a greater variety of minority-related courses ...strongly recommended as part of a well-rounded education"
--the University "strongly reassert" its commitment to the goal of increased numbers of minority faculty and "make public its efforts to recruit minority faculty"
--efforts be made "to induce more minority students to join traditional organizations ... in particular ... the editorial staff of the student newspaper ... as one means of promoting the concerns of minority students within traditional channels"
--education "via workshops, pamphlets, etc. and increased interracial interactions" used for "dispelling stereotypes and defensiveness"
--the number of minority students attending the University be increased
--information about the number of minority students be made more readily available, for example, by printing the actual numbers in the student newspaper, to "help correct a demonstrated tendency by students of all racial groups to overestimate the number of minorities attending the University... [and to] serve as evidence of efforts by the University to increase the size of the minority student population"
The ultimate goal of the Race Relations study, as Gifford stated it quite forthrightly in his Preface, was as follows: "Our obligation is clear: all students, whatever their race, must feel welcome at the University of Rochester. That is the right and moral goal to strive for. We cannot be satisfied with anything less."
Although Gifford left the University after only a few years to become Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and O'Brien left to become Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, many of their initiatives were continued and expanded in the next Rochester administration, that of President Dennis O'Brien. Indeed, after a period of some turbulence in the University and the community, in the summer of 1984, Dennis O'Brien publicly launched his administration with a strong commitment to improving minority status and minority relations at the University. He appointed a 17-member "Community Relations Committee" consisting of representatives of the black community, alumni, student groups, UR administrators, and UR faculty and charged it to consider: African American studies; recruitment of minority faculty, staff, and students; support services; security services; and student judicial procedures. During the fall of 1984, the committee generated and refined specific recommendations for the first four areas of concern; these were published in Currents on March 15, 1985 along with an unprecedented joint statement of consensus by O'Brien and community leader James McCuller.
Among the recommendations enthusiastically accepted by O'Brien were: establishing and staffing the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies; preparing and publishing a new affirmative action plan and agreeing to oversee its implementation through a University affirmative action review board working in conjunction with a community advisory group; appointing a significant number of new minority faculty, staff and administrative personnel, including a special Assistant to the President to evaluate and coordinate University-wide support services for minority students; creating a student security advisory committee to work closely with the Security and Traffic Division in efforts to improve officer recruitment, training and evaluation. A memorandum from the community-based "African-American Education Oversight Commission" published in the same issue of Currents endorsed O'Brien's efforts:
Since you began your tenure as President in July, 1984 you have begun to marshalresources of a capable staff to focus on African-American problems and needs. Your openness and reasonable frankness to discuss what was previously viewedas provocative and explosive African-American issues in a non-defensive and non-adversarial style gives us reason to be encouraged that we can and will make progress on other critical issues.
In the spirit of these agreements and endorsements, O'Brien appointed as his Vice President for Enrollments, Placement, and Alumni Affairs an admissions dean from Cornell, James J. Scannell, known for his strong commitment to minority student recruitment and retention. Scannell began in November 1984, and when O'Brien formally introduced him to the Faculty Senate on February 19, 1985 he clearly indicated his priorities by noting his surprise at discovering that so few minority students were actually in the University's applicant pool. Making them a "target group," Scannell devoted considerable effort over the next several years to expanding the number of minority applicants and their enrollment "yield." By September, 1988 it was clear that his efforts had paid off; for the first time in its history, the University admitted a freshman class with over 100 minority students, 10.2% of that year's unusually large cohort. The percentage of minority students remained above 10% in the next two freshman cohorts. At the same time, the number of entering Asian students grew slowly but steadily from 6.3% of the freshman cohort in 1986 to 9.6% in 1990, while foreign students hovered around 4%. An admissions profile for these years is presented in the table below.
| 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black | 53 (4.5) | 40 (3.6) | 78 (5.9) | 65 (5.8) | 69 (6.2) |
| Hispanic | 34 (2.9) | 15 (1.3) | 57 (4.3) | 57 (4.2) | 47 (4.2) |
| Asian or Pacific Islander | 74 (6.3) | 79 (7.0) | 88 (6.7) | 87 (7.7) | 107 (9.6) |
| Native American | 1 | 0 | 2 | 6 | 2 |
| Foreign | 45 (3.8) | 5 (0.4) | 40 (3.0) | 21 (1.9) | 47 (4.2) |
| Total Freshman | 1171 | 1120 | 1318 | 1126 | 1114 |
Another priority of the O'Brien administration was the creation and build up of the Frederick Douglass Institute. This required the commitment of resources, both from within the University budget and from outside agencies such as the Ford Foundation, which awarded a five-year, $300,000 grant in 1989. The Institute first appeared on the pages of the Official Bulletin for 1986-1987; a simple entry announced that "The Institute, which will sponsor programs of teaching and research at the undergraduate level, is expected within three years to include the equivalent of five full-time faculty." An expanded entry in 1987-1988 listed Karen Fields as Director and Elias Mandala (History), Jesse Moore (History) and Deborah Mullen (Student Affairs) as "Associates and Faculty." The Bulletin for 1988-1989 added Joseph Inikori (History) as "Visiting Professor." In 1989-1990 Inikori is listed as a full professor and associate director of the Institute, Ben Ebenhack (Chemical Engineering) is added to the faculty list, and, for the first time, the Bulletin describes two dozen Institute-sponsored and cross-listed courses. Among the new courses were: "The Black Family in Historical Perspective," "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Africa, 1650-1850," and "Black Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Twentieth Century." The growth of the Frederick Douglass Institute thus contributed an important new field of intellectual activity to the University's academic life, helped add a minority presence to the faculty, and no doubt contributed positively to minority student recruitment efforts.
In yet another area -- co-curricular life -- the University was witness to developments to which it could point with pride. This was the largely spontaneous proliferation of student organizations reflecting various racial, ethnic, national, religious, sexual and other identities. Already in 1987 the University could boast of the following long list of diverse groups: ADITI (students promoting the culture of the Indian subcontinent); Alpha Phi Alpha (a black Greek organization); Asian American Association; Association for Black Drama and the Arts; Association of Minority Engineers; Black Students' Union; Chinese Students' Association; Gospel Choir; Hillel; International Association; Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship; Korean Students' Association; Spanish and Latin Students' Association; Women's Caucus. Reflecting a continually broadening sense of diversity, by 1990 the list also included: Against the Current (a women's group); Alpha Kappa Alpha (another black Greek organization); Black and Hispanic Women's Alliance; Charles Drew Premedical Society; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Friends Association; the Vietnamese Student Association. The rapid growth of student organizations in the late eighties is clearly recorded in successive issues of the Interpres yearbook and, to some extent, in the Official Bulletin.
The multiplication of organizations was closely advised and supported by the University's Student Affairs staff in the Student Activities Office and by Minority Student Affairs. In addition, the Dean of Students' office worked with the College's Center for Academic Support to create a climate for diversity by arranging each year for speakers like Coretta Scott King, who addressed students during freshman orientation in 1984. Moreover, in the late eighties the Student Affairs staff, in conjunction with the College, developed "Focus" programs for freshmen built around student- and staff-led groups which worked through case studies designed to educate entering students about diversity and each other. At the same time, they also put together the Human Relations Advocates, a multicultural group trained to lead discussions in residential areas on issues of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation. This intense effort to increase inter-group understanding was in addition to trying to provide activity fairs for freshmen (to promote the wide array of campus organizations), assure new dietary options to accommodate the special needs of diverse groups in the dining services, arrange new worship space for Muslim students, guarantee services for students with physical and learning disabilities, provide workshops on date rape in fraternity houses and in the dormitories, develop space where women athletes would feel comfortable working out, and encourage the representative inclusion of a broadly diverse group of students on campus judicial boards, orientation staffs, and in residential life positions. Student Affairs staff understood that it was important to reflect and respond to the growing diversity of the student population on campus. It is no wonder that they often felt strained to their limits as they tried to facilitate positive changes in the campus environment while working under the extreme and increasing constraints of a limited budget and while struggling to "catch up" with the transformation in student culture that was the inevitable result of dramatic changes in student demographics.
There were other indications of strain and disaffection among University staff in the late eighties and none were clearer than those expressed by members of the minority faculty and staff community. Perhaps the clearest was a document signed by Karen Fields, Deborah Mullen and several others, entitled "Towards the Future of Minority Student Affairs: A Discussion Paper." The authors note that twenty years earlier, in 1969, the Black Students Union occupied the Faculty Club in order to get the University to address their legitimate concerns. In 1989, parallel feelings of frustration were still common. Of greatest immediate concern was the administration's handling of the Office of Minority Student Affairs. The essential responsibility for minority students had since 1973 been in the hands of Frederick Jefferson, who a few years later also assumed oversight of international students and special support services. In 1986 Jefferson moved to the President's Office in fulfillment of Dennis O'Brien's 1985 pledge to appoint an African American special assistant. In the wake of Jefferson's elevation and the reassignment of administrative responsibility for international students and special support services, the University also created a new office Office of Minority Student Affairs/Higher Education Opportunity Program under the aegis of the Division of Student Affairs. This new office was to be led by an individual holding the joint title of Associate Dean of Student Affairs/Director of Minority Student Affairs (Deborah Mullen from 1987 to 1989), who was in turn to oversee an Associate Director of Minority Student Affairs for Student Services and an Associate Director of Minority Affairs for HEOP.
Because these administrative arrangements were fundamentally similar to those under Jefferson (who had reported to the Vice President for Student Affairs), no questions were raised initially about their adequacy or appropriateness. Minority faculty and staff came to feel, however, that problems were built into an administrative structure which consigned Minority Student Affairs to the non-academic jurisdiction of Student Affairs, long separated from the academic side of undergraduate education and student services. As the "Discussion Paper" put it,
In general, the purpose of these programs and services [of the Office of Minority Student Affairs] has been to enhance the retention and achievement of African- American, Hispanic and Native American students at the University. Because the
Office has been charged with the retention of minority students as its primary concern, the definition, design, and delivery of services must encompass academic and developmental dimensions of student life. The Student Affairs Division at the University of Rochester, by and large, has a non-academic mission, and it is not traditionally viewed ... as an appropriate partner in the delivery of academically- oriented programs and services. Therefore, this mandate of the Office of Minority Student Affairs presents a challenge to the traditional configuration of things. And the challenge to OMSA has been to build bridges that enable it to fulfill its dual mandate.
OMSA did try to build bridges under Deborah Mullen's leadership -- with Academic Advising, Counseling and Psychological Services, and the faculty directly. But in 1989 these bridges seemed inadequate.
Despite important advances in interdepartmental collaboration, we continue to be concerned that these have not yet gone far enough. There does not yet exist a centralized and comprehensive approach to the delivery of support services for students most at risk for failure ... What is missing is a comprehensive system for doing what we know needs to be done -- and an administrative location that can maximize its effectiveness. We suggest that such a system would be housed most appropriately in the College of Arts and Science, and that this move should become a priority among the strategies for enhancing the achievement and retention of underrepresented minority students.
Two other concerns raised in the "Discussion Paper" and poignantly conveyed through a series of "vignettes" were deeply ingrained racial biases and huge gaps in understanding the real needs and experiences of minority students. The following vignettes illustrated biases and blindspots, in these cases on the part of faculty.
[from an adminstrator colleague] A woman reported taking a course on American women that ignored women of color. Her acerbic comment: "Why wasn't it called what it was, 'American white women'?"
[from a staff colleague] A young man rushed into my office after a class, infuriated by remarks made there by his teacher to the class as a whole, to this effect: "I don't know how long we can keep paying for black and Hispanic teen-agers to keep on having more and more babies." When I asked whether he had responded to the point in class, he said he had not. When I asked why he did not, he said he had felt intimidated.
Two additional vignettes illustrated gaps between minority student experience and mainstream comprehension.
[from a faculty colleague] "I know I could do better," said a young man. "But I work twenty hours on campus, plus I have a week-end job -- I send some money home, and I can't get the time to go for tutoring."
[from an administrator colleague] A woman student reported a sometimes hot argument when she and a group of women of color tried to fund (through student programming) a project that involved work with teen-age girls in the community. Some of the students reviewing the project pointed out that (unlike inviting speakers, for example), this idea didn't seem to fall under the guidelines for students' educational activities.
If the authors of the "Discussion Paper" were correct -- and there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the reported vignettes or their implications -- then the University still had a long way to go to achieve a truly tolerant and integrated community and an environment that really welcomed all members of its increasingly diverse student body. Proclamations by President O'Brien, administrative reorganization of Minority Student Affairs, and the dedicated efforts of the Division of Student Affairs had been, at best, only partially successful in transforming the internal environment of the University. One major, persisting problem was structural: Student Affairs, and now OMSA as part of it, were separated from the curricular and academic sides of undergraduate life, instead being compartmentalized into "support services" and non-academic "human relations" programming. The Frederick Douglass Institute was just getting started and therefore of only limited effectiveness. It also had a major academic mission to accomplish. Minority faculty and staff were too few in number to facilitate major changes by their efforts alone. As the "Discussion Paper" put the problem,
There is an urgent need to enhance the cultural sensitivity of all students and to increase their sophistication about the diverse human world in which they will live out their lives. Consciously accommodating diversity should also be the business of faculty, administrators, staff members, and service persons -- and of all adminstrative units. It should not be left to OMSA, the Frederick Douglass Institute, the International Student Office, and the Office of University and Community Affairs. ... The issues surrounding diversity and multicultural community are far too complex for any one office or set of offices alone.
It seems clear that a considerable distance separated campus realities in the late eighties from the vision projected by Bernard Gifford in 1983 -- of a university energetically and imaginatively committed to institution-wide and proactive efforts to improve "interracial interaction," reinforced by broad changes in the curriculum. The sad irony was that in the early eighties the University of Rochester could have been a leader among colleges and universities, but as "diversity" moved forward on the national higher educational agenda at the turn of the nineties the institution seemed to stutter and falter, encumbered by its loosely connected internal structures and bureaucratic organization.
The nineties, in fact, marked a turning point with regard to diversity at the University of Rochester, in a largely negative direction. Earlier enthusiasm tended to fade, and what was once an unambivalent sense of institutional or, at least, central administrative mission became rather fuzzy and diffuse. The root cause was not so much a change of heart as the emergence of deeply troubling financial preoccupations. As these concerns grew larger and increasingly central, other institutional priorities shifted out of focus.
The first major financial problem to emerge in the nineties was the tuition "discount rate," an issue which had direct bearing on admissions and therefore undergraduate diversity goals. The discount rate refers to the amount of tuition revenue not actually collected but "given back" to students as financial aid in the form of scholarships and grants measured as a percentage of tuition (loans and work-study awards are exempted from discount calculations). In 1984 and 1985 the discount rates for the incoming freshman class were 25.9% and 29.5%, respectively, meaning that in those years net tuition revenue was only 74.1 and 70.5 cents on the dollar collected. The discount rate crept upwards in the later eighties, until it was 30.9% in 1989. Then for the freshman class entering the University in fall 1990, it suddenly spiked more than ten percentage points to 41.0%. In 1991 it dipped only slightly to 39.5%. Successive years with these high discount rates were, understandably, cause for great alarm. President O'Brien's remarks to the Faculty Senate in November, 1990 vividly captures the University's level of anxiety.
Our net tuition is about sixty-five cents on the dollar ... That is ... we have to take thirty to thirty-five cents out of every undergraduate tuition dollar and convert that into financial aid. ... Cornell is very concerned about the level of their financial aid transfer, or their net tuition and they are funding at sixteen cents. ... Their trustees are thinking that they ought to freeze the level of financial aid subvention from general revenue at about sixteen percent or some such figure. ... Not only are we over twice that at the present time, but in the entering undergraduate freshman class this year, the discount rate was forty cents on the dollar so we only got sixty cents net tuition revenue. That's a very serious problem. ... if the experience of this year turns out to be the typical experience, then over a five-year period you're going to build yourself a problem somewhere between eight, nine, or ten million dollars over current budget shortfalls. That is a major, major issue for the institution.
According to Enrollments Vice President Scannell's analysis, the largest single cause of the growth in the discount rate was the smaller number of high school graduates nationwide and the resulting intensification in competition for students in the increasingly tight admissions market. Since the University still drew the largest share of its students from New York State, the growth of the SUNY system with its very low tuition was an additional source of concern. The UR had to offer more in financial aid and to dip more deeply into the lower levels of its applicant pool in order to fill its freshman classes. These strategies resulted in higher aggregate discount rates and lower "quality" as measured by mean SAT scores. While the largest share of financial aid went to non-minority students and although non-minority students also recorded many of the lowest SAT scores, minority students now became a decidedly less attractive target for aggressive recruitment in the eyes of some. An interchange reflecting rapidly altering perceptions was recorded in the Faculty Senate minutes for January 22, 1991.
Professor X: The University has committed itself to supporting minority education.
O'Brien: Yes.
Professor X: And here financial aid at a very high level is essential. Can the University afford to continue that commitment?
It is thus unsurprising that in their 1990, 1991 and 1992 reports to the Faculty Senate, University admissions officials were more reticent than usual about the number of African American and Hispanic students in the freshman cohort, especially in striking contrast to their triumphal announcements in the late eighties of greater than 10% minority students per entering class. Instead, Admissions shifted its focus in several different ways, for example, to the aggressive recruitment of transfer students. Admissions also concentrated on international students, for these rather explicit reasons.
[Scannell to Faculty Senate, September 24, 1991]: ... in the makeup of this year's class ... we doubled the number of international students ... That was deliberate. We have never been terribly aggresssive in pursuing international students. ... what we did was pay much more attention to them during the process of applying and it paid off. They also come at a lesser rate needing financial assistance -- 45% ... receiving some institutional funds versus our 66% for U.S. citizens. ... We've been at about 5% of the freshman class being nternational. This year we're at 10%. We think ... that the right place for us would be closer to 15% than to 10%.
Over the next several years, the following patterns emerged.
| 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black | 66 (5.4) | 61 (4.8) | 90 (7.3) | 118 (9.6) | 101 (8.4) |
| Hispanic | 42 (3.5) | 47 (3.7) | 52 (4.2) | 71 (5.8) | 62 (5.1) |
| Asian or Pacific Islander | 143 (11.8) | 120 (9.5) | 126 (10.2) | 142 (11.5) | 134 (11.1) |
| Native American | 0 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Foreign | 98 (8.1) | 103 (8.1) | 71 (5.8) | 68 (5.5) | 52 (4.3) |
| Total Freshman | 1217 | 1268 | 1230 | 1231 | 1204 |
It is clear from these data that after the marked dip in minority student entrants in 1991 and 1992, their numbers rose again from 1993 to 1995. Foreign students showed a reverse pattern while Asian/Pacific Islanders held fairly steady. Despite these numbers, Scannell and his staff rarely publicy enthused about "diversity." Scannell ocasionally reviewed old affirmative action goals and procedures, and in November, 1993, Enrollments Associate Vice President Kathy Kurz boasted that "the University of Rochester is probably close to the most diverse university in the country, if not The most diverse." Kurz's statement, however, was most notable for its distinctiveness. Scannell made no such global statements in his frequent reports to the Faculty Senate in these years, and he instead focused primarily on efforts aimed at filling the freshman class, decreasing discount rates and raising SAT scores. Diversity in undergraduate admissions was no longer unambivalently proclaimed as an unquestionably accepted social goal and educational objective because it now seemed like one of the problems contributing to the University's financial difficulties.
Another closely related financial problem also emerged in these same years, and it too had implications for diversity. This was the problem of excessive "draw on the endowment" and the need to fix it with a forceful "rampdown." This problem was, of course, coupled with the escalating discount rate, because declining net undergraduate tuition revenue meant that the University had to expend endowment funds at a higher rate than usual in order to keep the budget in balance. Other circumstances likewise contributed to a sense of financial emergency: cuts in Federal and State financial aid (which were directly connected to the rising discount rate), difficulties with indirect cost recovery on Federal research grants, poor endowment performance, and a disappointing collection of gift revenue because of a recessionary economy. These problems, especially because they all seemed to intensify at one time, added their share to the University's financial woes. But whatever the mix of causes, the central administration's attention kept circling back to "ramping down" the annual draw on the endowment from 7.6% to 6.0% or perhaps even 5.0%.
The University trustees also took an active role in "ramp down" analysis and strategy discussion. Indeed, there is evidence in the Faculty Senate minutes to suggest that the trustees probably initiated preoccupation with the excessive draw on the endowment and promoted a sense of urgency about the need to solve this problem. It is also clear from the minutes that in the early nineties it became common practice for the Chair of the Board of Trustees to appear regularly at the Senate, to participate there in wide-ranging conversations about the University's budget options along with key administrators and members of the Faculty Senate Budget Committee. The basic message emerging from these intense and high level conversations was that the University had hit hard economic times and that academic budgets, if not severely cut or frozen, would be essentially flat for the foreseeable future. Hard economic times thus had implications for faculty and staff benefits, annual salaries, and replacement or new hiring decisions.
Hard economic times had an even more dramatic impact on Student Affairs and this, in turn, had an important negative affect on the University's diversity efforts. Beginning in the late eighties, Student Affairs lost significant numbers of staff; as one indicator, in the Dean of Students Office alone the annual budget dropped from $218,126 in 1988 to $136,810 in 1994. These economic realities lurk as a bitter irony behind a March 17, 1992 Student Affairs presentation to the Faculty Senate, part of which touched on proactive efforts then underway to foster inter-group understanding in the new student culture. The Director of Greek Affairs reported as follows.
There are many students of color that are involved in the predominately white Greek system. I make that distinction because we do have an all-black Greek council, predominately African-American fraternities on the campus. We are encouraging the students, though, to recruit from different groups of students, obviously international students. We have hardly any international students become interested in the fraternities and sororities on the campus. They have no concept of it, but that's something that we are encouraging the students to become involved in.
Given the serious budget cuts Student Affairs had to sustain, active "encouragement" of this sort -- promoting what Gifford had earlier called "interracial interaction" -- would have to be scaled-back or eliminated if surviving staff were to keep basic operations going.
The University's budget problems seem to have had a major and negative impact on another front too: producing very limited enthusiasm for minority faculty recruitment efforts, one of O'Brien's major pledges in 1985. Evidence for this comes from the report of Professor Morris Eaves' Ad Hoc Committee on Minority Issues, which had been proposed by O'Brien and established by the Faculty Senate in 1990. The Eaves Committee spent close to two years looking into the local situation and comparing the University of Rochester to other major universities in the country. The committee's conclusions were devastating.
... in recent years the University of Rochester has made almost no progress in creating the more diverse faculty that will be needed to serve its more diverse student body. We cannot appeal to the similarity between our lamentable situation and the situation at peer institutions, because in fact we rank with the hindmost in every survey that we have examined. ... Reasons for our lackluster performance are numerous, but all point to the absence of sustained commitment and coherent remedies. ... our publicly articulated policies, in so far as we have any, are particularly muddled, and our collective performance, insofar as there has been any, has been particularly poor.
Backing up these judgments were such data as these: in 1991 the percentage of minority faculty (including Asians) in tenured ranks at the University of Rochester was 4.1%, whereas at the eighteen other major universities surveyed it ranged from a low of 5.7% to a high of 11.0%; in the same year the percentage of "tenure eligible" faculty was 9.2% for UR compared to a low of 8.2% and a high of 24.5% at the eighteen other universities. Equally important, the UR numbers in 1991 represented very slight increases from what they were in 1985 when Dennis O'Brien, in concert with the African-American Education Oversight Commission, proclaimed UR's strong commitment to affirmative action hiring procedures.
According to the Eaves committee, between 1985 and 1991 the University of Rochester had lost its will and its way. The Affirmative Action Review Board supposedly created in the mid-eighties no longer existed in the early nineties (if it ever had), and the "plan," in the words of the Eaves committee, "turned out to be empty oratory." Specifically, "the general lack of concern and sustained commitment are reflected in a host of other lacks: a lack of clear policies, a lack of attractive, well-articulated incentives, a lack of meaningful oversight, and a lack of well-established, well-integrated administrative mechanisms." For remedies, the Eaves committee urged the Faculty Senate, the President and central administration, deans and directors, department chairs and individual faculty to give minority faculty recruitment and retention "immediate attention" and "highest priority." The University should "announce its commitment to an aggressive set of remedies" which should be backed by "systematic oversight and clearly articulated, effective incentives." In short, at every level of the University "there must be powerful, persistent commitment expressed in concrete actions."
But instead of this response, the report got a distressingly cool, indeed substantially hostile reception from the Faculty Senate. Discussed and debated at four Senate meetings -- in April, September, October and November, 1992 -- the report drew fire for its overly narrow and perhaps illegal definition of "diversity," for its urging the University to invest increasingly scarce resources on fishing for minority faculty in a shallow or nonexistent pool of talent, and for both fomenting racial and ethnic conflict and purveying "high-minded, liberal bourgeois crap." Most chilling was the attack by a high-ranking, prestigious engineer-administrator, head of one of the University's applied science laboratories.
... the tone of ... [the report] seemed to be extremely confused and the sorts of statistics presented raise more questions than they answer. ... There are all sorts of ways of looking at these numbers, but just to come up with a few tables that say, "Well, we're not doing very well and this is terribly lamentable," as if we have some type of problem and then advocate severe remedies -- and I remind people that that will be at the expense of something -- we are in a zero-sum game around here. ... is missing in this report. It seems like a gallimaufry of ideas thrown together and then concluding with a phrase saying, "Ain't it awful. Throw money at it. Fix it."
O'Brien and several faculty members gallantly defended the general goals and specific recommendations of the Eaves committee report, but when a vote was finally taken after much objection and delay, the resolution that passed was, in the words of a strong Eaves supporter, "very bland." O'Brien himself commented after that largely symbolic vote, "Now comes the hard part. ... Passing the motion was the easy part." He tried his best to salvage something from the discussion by directing attention to the work of Jesse Moore, newly appointed University Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, who had succeeded in getting U.S. Department of Education Ronald E. McNair funds to help increase the University's pool of minority graduate students. When the issue of minority recruitment was revisited in January, 1994, Eaves briefly presented data indicating embarrassingly paltry progress in the faculty ranks, while Moore took the opportunity to present far more extensive data on the University's efforts to recruit minority graduate students. But Eaves' remarks struck home most forcefully. First noting that the figures for faculty had not changed much in two years because "there hasn't been a lot of hiring from then to now," he commented:
... one of the commonest responses, sort of instinctive responses I think, to complaints about minority figures in hiring faculty is that the pipeline is going to make it all better in the long run. It's quite clear that the long run is going to be the very long run if things go on this way. In fact, if it goes on this way, in another ten years, if the pattern persists, we'll be down another hundred or so recipients of doctorates by African-Americans and the pipeline will hardly exist at all. As far as I can tell, there's very little reason to rely on any increases in the pipeline at this point that will just naturally produce improvements in the numbers for faculty.
The upshot of all this was that by early 1994, when "diversity" was gaining momentum nationally, the situation at the University of Rochester looked even less promising than it had in 1990/1991 when the "discount" issue first hit in major way or in 1992 when commitment to minority faculty recruitment failed to achieve a clear consensus. The UR community did not even respond positively to essentially cost-free initiatives like Frederick Jefferson's efforts in 1993 to organize focus group workshops on "diversity and community." Back in 1983/1984 the UR was something of a national leader, at least in the philosophical commitment of its top administrators and faculty. A decade later, because of institutional inertia and the accidents of timing, the University of Rochester had turned progressively inward and had become so preoccupied with local problems that it was, at best, seemingly but dimly aware of important national trends.
The new administration of President Thomas Jackson, beginning formally in the summer of 1994, did not improve the situation. The basic reason was that it became, in Jackson's own words, "a bit obsessed" with the problem considered most central at the end of the previous administration, that of the discount rate (in 1993 up to 46.6% of undergraduate tuition revenue) and the related problem of declining student "quality" as measured by SAT scores. Jackson stated the issues quite explicitly in his first recorded meeting with the Faculty Senate, a get-acquainted session in April, 1994.
We're off the scale in many ways in terms of tuition discounting ... what's happened here over the last five or six years has happened at most private universities. They just started from a smaller base. They've gone from 25%-38%. We've gone from 35%-47%. ... We could change the dollar revenue coming in on tuition tomorrow by downing the quality of the student body. The question institutionally for us is what sorts of trade-offs does that involve? ... The problem you have to worry about is whether or not you're on a slippery slope, that you lower the quality every year. In ten years you no longer have anybody who's willing to pay tuition to come here and you've made things worse in the long run. Those are real tradeoffs currently on the table as to the amount of money that comes in and the quality of the student body.
Jackson and new Provost Charles Phelps began intensive work on these problems during the summer of 1994. As data became available on the new freshman cohort, it was clear that the discount rate had gone up yet again, to 49.3%. A large share of this increase was due to stiff competition with SUNY schools for New York State residents. Only 13% of students admitted to both SUNY and UR but without UR financial aid chose to enroll at the University; with financial aid, the percentage accepting UR over SUNY jumped to 55%. However, students from the six county area around Rochester who received a $5,000 "Community Grant" but no other financial aid showed a 115% increase in enrollment. Seizing on this "data point," Jackson and Phelps reasoned that the Community Grant greatly increased the yield of non-needy students, who also had significantly higher SAT scores. Generalizing to all New York counties, they proposed a $5,000 "Meliora Grant" to state residents (and alumni children), which they hoped would dramatically improve the enrollment yield of non-needy, high SAT students.
In October, 1994 Jackson took the Meliora Grant proposal to the trustees, who approved the experiment. Admissions then immediately began aggressively marketing the program to applicants for the freshman class that would enter in fall 1995. In May 1995 preliminary data on that coalescing cohort indicated that Jackson's plan had worked remarkably well. Full pay students were up 3 to 4 percent and SAT scores a dramatic 30 to 40 points. Jackson made the decision at that time to consolidate the SAT gain by freezing overall class size, although this meant sacrificing potential tuition revenue. When firmer data on the impact of the Meliora Grant were available in September, 1995, this is how Enrollments Vice President Scannell summarized what had happened in the 1994-1995 admissions year.
The decision was made by Tom Jackson in the springtime, when we were seeing a significant quality gain, not to go for the traditional 50 [additional] students but to reduce that target to 1100. ... the fact that we came in with that number of enrollees is a function of yield going up, mostly as a factor of the Meliora program ... Here is the quality increase in SAT scores of 34 points. ... as you would expect, we went from 49% from New York State to 57% ... What Meliora did was take the need based aid percentages in the freshman class down from 71% to 65%. ... This is the first time that curve has actually turned around.
Jackson now extrapolated from the lessons learned in experimenting with the Meliora Grant. By shifting emphasis from revenue gain to improvement in quality as the top admissions priority he hit upon the idea that improvement in quality would provide the mechanism for ultimate revenue gain. As he told the Faculty Senate on September 19, 1995, "I'm convinced that the great hope for this institution is that revenue will follow quality. If we can get good enough students to come back, we'll get enough students who will be willing to pay close enough to our sticker price that our net revenue will go up ..." Then generalizing from the experience of 1994-1995, Jackson reasoned that the easiest way to achieve higher quality was to decrease class size even if it meant short-term tuition losses. He could achieve double gains by dropping out the bottom of the applicant pool.
... at the bottom of our applicant pool currently are our most needy students, what we call sometimes "double poor." They're poor financially and they're poor academically, so by dropping them we'd drop the neediest students and we'd drop the poorest quality.
This was the birth of the "Renaissance Plan," which Jackson presented to the trustees later in the fall of 1995. Once again, the trustees approved Jackson's initiative and committed themselves temporarily to reversing the "rampdown" on the endowment draw in order to allow the plan to go forward.
In its formal statement, the Renaissance Plan called for a freshman class to enter in 1996 with 900 rather than 1100 to 1150 students. Jackson explained the outlines of his plan and the reasoning behind it to the Faculty Senate on November 21, 1995.
A reduction in the size of the student body will next year have a dramatic impact on the average student body quality of the institution. ... if you make rational admission decisions, you won't be accepting the lower-end that you need to fill a class of 1150 if you accept a class of 900. ... by bringing in higher quality students and providing an environment here ... that is attractive to those students ... we can change the character of [who] wants to apply here and come here to mirror a lot of other institutions that today do better than we do on student body quality and, most importantly perhaps, revenue per student. ... Reducing the size of the student body next year has an immediate quality increase. It has a revenue consequence. The role of the trustees in this was to commit to fill in what we called to them "investment cost" of this new program, which we estimate to be about $13 million over the first five-year period. ... The trustees are committed to do that [with the] endowment as necessary ... The reduction in the student body size can be reversed if it doesn't work and we can go back to trying to increase revenue by increasing the size of the student body.
When preliminary data were available in May, 1996, indications were that the plan had, in fact, "worked." As of May 22, 865 River Campus freshmen were enrolled in the class. Their average combined SAT score was 1293, up 53 points from the 1995 freshman cohort. Although financial aid and therefore the discount rate continued high, administration officials were not overly concerned. As Provost Phelps put it,
We did not expect to do anything except continue on the path of a fairly high discount rate this year, if for no other reason that we've put in a fairly large body of new merit aid programs that are counted in that. ... But the goal here is to maximize the quality signal to the rest of the world and then, beginning in subsequent years ... begin to see changes in the way people perceive us, how they apply, and in the yield. ... There was a very deliberate process here, not to trade off money for quality this year, because we want to maximize the quality signal.
One issue troubled a number of people, however, and that was the issue of how the Renaissance Plan would affect the recruitment and enrollment of underrepresented minority students and diversity at the University in general. Jackson was clearly sensitive to this issue because already on January 24, 1995 (and at other times) he had indicated his approval of diversity in the University's undergraduate population. Indeed, he commented on that occasion that UR had seemed to do better with a "numerical" count of diversity than with actually building a diverse community. Despite these assurances, when the Renaissance Plan was formally announced to the Faculty Senate in November, 1995 some faculty still did not feel confident about the University's continuing commitment. One of them pointedly asked Jackson the following question:
In the past we have talked that the student body should reflect the diversity of the population in the United States. Is that diversity going to be a goal too?
Jackson responded as follows:
It is a goal for a lot of very important internal reasons for the institution. Educational institutions, it seems to me, are about diversity of ideas and it's going to be reflected in the kind of population we need to have here as students. Nothing in this [Plan] is inconsistent with that goal.
Yet when Scannell reported preliminary admissions results in May, 1996 he indicated that the number of underrepresented minority students in the first "Renaissance" cohort was down to 11% from 14% the previous year. He also reminded the Faculty Senate that he had been strongly committed to the recruitment of underrepresented minority students to the University of Rochester for twelve years and that he had decided to leave his post as Enrollments Vice President as of June. The tables and charts accompanying his presentation -- for the first time in twelve years -- contained no data on the racial, ethnic, or national characteristics of the freshman cohort. Instead, they were filled entirely with detailed analyses of SAT and ACT scores.
Scannell was replaced by Neill Sanders, whose first presentation to the Faculty Senate, on September 17, 1996, focused on the now consolidated Renaissance freshman class. He was able to report an average composite SAT score of 1288 and a growth from 24% to 40% of the freshman cohort with SATs above 1350. The discount rate was 55.3%. But Sanders presented no tables indicating ethnic, racial or national characteristics and failed to mention minorities at all. When he returned a year later, on September 16, 1997, to report on the second Renaissance class, the substance of his presentation was quite different. Although he still offered no tables, he reported that The College had failed by 100 students to enroll an entering freshman cohort of 900. Compensating for this disappointment to some extent was a slight improvement in average composite SAT score to 1298 and a drop in the discount rate -- the first in many years -- to 53.6%. But the number of underrepresented minorities was down, now being under 10% of the class. Sanders focused primarily, however, not on the drop in minority students but on the shortfall of 100 freshmen overall. He pointed to problems in overly optimistic springtime admissions forecasts and to a 3% drop in the yield rate. The University needed to overhaul its recruitment publications and to reach out better to targetted schools where there were students whose families had greater ability to pay undiscounted tuition.
One year later, on September 15, 1998, Sanders again appeared before the Faculty Senate. This time a faculty member complained that Sanders was rattling off numbers without organizing his data into easily readable charts and tables. The numbers indicated a River Campus freshman cohort of 950, an increase in the average composite SAT score to 1302, and a drop in the discount rate to 50.2%. But the precentage of underrepresented minority students was down again, for the third year in a row. This is how the data looked for the first three Renaissance Plan years.
| 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black | 57 (5.6) | 38 (4.3) | 38 (3.6) |
| Hispanic | 47 (4.6) | 34 (3.8) | 38 (3.6) |
| Asian or Pacific Islander | 125 (12.4) | 104 (11.7) | 127 (12.0) |
| Native American | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Foreign | 44 (4.4) | 36 (4.0) | 40 (3.8) |
| Total Freshman | 1011 | 892 | 1062 |
Although administration officials were quick to point out that several other universities around the country were also having difficulties enrolling underrepresented minority students, these data would seem to indicate that, at least in terms of freshman admissions, the Renaissance Plan looked as if it had an unfortunate if unintended impact on diversity at the University of Rochester.
Indications from elsewhere in the University suggest that diversity suffered other setbacks as well during the first phase of the Jackson administration. The clearest evidence is in the area of minority faculty and staff recruitment and retention. In the first September of the new administration (1994), official data recorded 4.9% tenured minority faculty University-wide and another 9.3% non-tenured in tenure track ranks. By September 1997 the tenured percentage had risen very slightly to 5.2% but the non-tenured percentage had dropped to 7.0%. This, at best, flat curve indicated lack of real progress at the University despite Provost Phelps' elaborate explanation to the Faculty Senate in January 1995 of the administrative mechanisms he had established to ensure serious efforts at minority recruitment. To make matters worse, by fall 1998 the University saw the departure of three highly visible African American administrators: Director of River Campus Admissions Wayne Locust, Director of River Campus Financial Aid Ryan Williams, and Dean of Sophomores Sharon Fluker. Symbolically, at least, it looked as if the cause of diversity had begun to lose ground during the Jackson administration. Since the Frederick Douglass Institute also entered a period of turbulence and instability at this same time and since few other obvious diversity initiatives were clearly visible on the River Campus, some wondered whether, in fact, the University had even drifted backwards against the national current.
Viewing the University of Rochester in the nineties from the historical perspective we have just presented helps explain a great deal about the institutional uncertainty and campus climate we encountered from late 1997 to early 1999 during our work as a committee. We discovered that knowing the past was indeed essential to understanding the present, especially with regard to the priorities, perceptions and confusions of administrators, faculty, staff and students. In effect, we developed something of what Charles Darwin called the ability to look at "every complex structure ... as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen." Specifically, the historical context we worked to recreate helped make comprehensible the University's present lack of a clearly identifiable institutional diversity policy, the absence of a linkage to the national "DiversityWeb," and the incoherence in much of the University's current diversity initiatives and programming. We will review the current campus climate in greater detail in the next section, "Institutional Audit."
Institutional Audit
As indicated above, we began to conduct our audit concurrently with the exploration of diversity efforts nationwide, and when we first focused on the specific method of audit the committee considered various procedural options we had already learned about. One possibility was to follow a formal protocol, such as outlined in Minorities on Campus: A Handbook for Enhancing Diversity published by the American Council on Education. Although we had not yet come to the conclusion that race and the status of underrepresented minorities on campus were urgent priorities, we found this protocol an excellent, step-by-step guide and therefore worth our s