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Report of the Residential College Commission
Subcommittee on Diversity

March, 1999

CONTENTS

Summary
Introduction
Diversity Around the Country
Historical Perspective
Institutional Audit
Recommendations
Signatures
Afterwords

Summary

The Residential College Commission Subcommittee on Diversity now concludes the work it began in November, 1997 as a student-staff-faculty task force charged to look into the problems the University might be having with "diversity," particularly in The College and especially as it affects the life of students. We first defined diversity very broadly and decided to proceed along three concurrent lines of inquiry: to find out what is being discussed and done about diversity in higher education around the country; to conduct an "institutional audit" of current diversity issues at the University of Rochester; and to see what recommendations we might be able to formulate to improve conditions for diversity at UR. As we moved simultaneously along these three paths, we came to two important realizations: that the role of underrepresented minorities in the campus community was an urgent priority and that we needed to develop an historical perspective in order better to understand the University's current circumstances.

The first section of our report, "Diversity Around the Country," provides a summary of our major findings as we tried to arrive at benchmarks for the University of Rochester. Our most important finding was that there is a great deal of activity underway in higher educational organizations, in specific colleges and universities, and on the Internet. We survey some of the leading organizations, conferences and diversity resources, and also present "diversity profiles" of four notable institutions: Brown University, Harvard University, University of Maryland, and University of Michigan. We became acutely aware of UR's absence from national diversity discussions and the nonexistence of its link to "DiversityWeb."

In part because of their recurrent emphasis in our national survey, we began to focus on the issues of race and underrepresented minorities on campus. We recognized that to understand the present status of these issues at UR, we needed to turn to the past to reconstruct the University's history in these areas. We began this process in detailed conversations with some of the individuals who have lived this history at the University. We continued through the exploration of whatever documentary evidence we could easily access. Our basic finding, reported in detail in the "Historical Perspective" section of our report, is that the University has done relatively well in its commitment to underrepresented minorities in certain phases of its history and relatively poorly in others. In general, the late seventies and eighties represented one of the better phases, while the nineties, for various, primarily financial reasons, has been one of the poorer ones.

In section three we turn to an "Institutional Audit" of current circumstances at the University. We report our methods of procedure and the summary of our conversations with administrators such as the Provost and the Dean of Enrollment Policy and Management. We also distill our conversations with students and representatives of student organizations and present highlights from our monitoring of student publications. Our basic finding is that the University does not currently have a clear diversity focus, especially with regard to the admission and welcoming of underrepresented minority students, and that this lack of focus is evident in administrative practices, a lack of coherence in programming, and the current student mood. Perhaps most notably, the UR seems to have lost the focus in this area it possessed more clearly in the past, and, as result, it is neither fulfilling earlier statements of its mission nor participating in the national discussions of the nineties.

In the fourth section we present specific recommendations. Our overriding goal is to suggest ways the University could progress by going "back to the future." In other words, we recommend that the University revisit earlier statements of priority and principle -- such as those articulated in the early and mid-eighties by Vice President Gifford and President O'Brien -- and rededicate itself by taking specific corrective steps keyed to current problems and realities. We offer fifteen recommendations, among which are the following: the University should develop a specific policy or mission statement expressing its commitment to diversity; a diversity focus should be integrated into freshman orientation activities and become a primary theme in Residential Life and Student Activities programming; serious consideration should be given to the creation of a multicultural center on campus; the revitalization of the Frederick Douglass Institute must be assured; intensive efforts should be made to recruit and retain underrepresented minority faculty, administrators and graduate students; the University should appoint a new Vice Provost as principal campus diversity officer who, with adequate budget and central authority, would oversee and coordinate all the institution's diversity efforts; the University should commit at least 1% of its endowment and other resources to the intensive recruitment of underrepresented minority undergraduates.

A brief "Afterwords" by one of our student members addresses the thorny question of how to define "minorities" and the implications different definitions have for Asian Americans in contrast to African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans.

Introduction

On April 14, 1997, the Association of American Universities, an organization of 62 leading North American research universities of which the University of Rochester is a member, adopted a statement "On the Importance of Diversity in University Admissions." In part, the statement reads as follows:

... We believe that our students benefit significantly from education that takes place within a diverse setting. In the course of their university education, our students encounter and learn from others who have backgrounds and characteristics very different from their own. As we seek to prepare students for life in the twenty-first century, the educational value of such encounters will become more important, not less, than in the past. A very substantial portion of our curriculum is enhanced by the discourse made possible by the heterogeneous backgrounds of our students. Equally, a significant part of education in our institutions takes place outside the classroom, in extracurricular activities where students learn how to work together, as well as to compete; how to exercise leadership, as well as to build consensus. If our institutional capacity to bring together a genuinely diverse group of students is removed -- or severely reduced -- then the quality and texture of the education we provide will be significantly diminished. ... We therefore reaffirm our commitment to diversity as a value that is central to the very concept of education in our institutions. And we strongly reaffirm our support for the continuation of admissions policies, consistent with the broad principles of equal opportunity and equal protection, that take many factors and characteristics into account -- including ethnicity, race, and gender -- in the selection of those individuals who will be students today, and leaders in the years to come.

     Soon after the publication (in The New York Times, April 24, 1997, p. A27) of this statement, the Residential College Commission chaired by Dean William S. Green began to explore the possibility of creating a "Diversity" subcommittee. Discussions continued informally during the summer and focused on identifying prospective members of the subcommittee. In October, 1997 the RCC, along with Student Association President Notoya Green, appointed students Ivette Ganatsios and Notoya Green and History Department faculty member Ted Brown co-chairs of the formally inaugurated subcommittee. An application process for student members was begun while consultation with Dean Green helped identify other faculty and staff to serve on the subcommittee. By November, the subcommittee began regular, usually weekly meetings. The membership of the subcommittee, which remained fairly stable for the remainder of the 1997-1998 academic year, was as follows: Student Members - Ben Becker (1998), David T. Chen (1999), Melissa Kucinski (2001), Paul Patrick (1998), Jose Perillan (1998, G), John Schoggins (1999), Sean Vereen (1999), Urmen Upadhyay (1998); Faculty and Staff Members - Norman Burnett (Director, Office of Minority Student Affairs), Curt Cadorette (Associate Professor, Religion and Classics), Mary Beth Cooper (Senior Associate Dean of Students), Rosemary Kegl (Associate Professor, English and Director, Womens Studies Program), Beth Olivares (Director, McNair Program); Co-Chairs - Ted Brown (Professor, History, Community and Preventive Medicine, and Medical Humanities, Ivette Ganatsios (1998), Notoya Green (1998).
     During its first weeks, the subcommittee grappled with the many possible meanings of "diversity." It achieved initial consensus by agreeing to define diversity in the broadest way to include heterogeneity in race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, social class, and physical capacity. The subcommittee was also committed to the principle, as stated in "On the Importance of Diversity in University Admissions," that, in general, the campus community should, in its students, staff and faculty, reflect the heterogeneity of today's world.
     The plan was to proceed along three lines: (1) to gather information about what other institutions and agencies around the country were doing with regard to diversity issues in higher education; (2) to conduct an institutional audit at the University of Rochester, particularly in the College, to learn about perceptions, priorities and procedures concerning diversity in various segments of the institution; (3) and to look into possible ways of improving campus climate with regard to diversity, perhaps by encouraging links between student organizations, innovations in Student Affairs programming, and modifications in certain current policies. Our intention was to do these three things concurrently, not in strict linear sequence. As we moved along our multiple paths, two realizations gradually became apparent to us: first, that the question of race and the role of underrepresented minorities in the campus community were urgent priorities; second, that it was necessary to develop an historical perspective in order better to understand the University's current circumstances.
     The subcommittee did most of its exploratory work during the spring 1998 semester. Several student members of the subcommittee graduated in May, but the remaining members kept in contact and met once during the summer. The subcommittee reassembled in the fall for continuing discussion, further research and the drafting of this report. At that time, we added a new student member, Melvaleen Berry (1999). Our findings and recommendations are summarized in the sections below.

Diversity Around the Country

     The subcommittee's survey of diversity initiatives around the country revealed that a large number of higher educational organizations and institutions have been very actively at work in this area. The American Council on Education (ACE), for example, has long been interested in diversity and has published several important monographs including Minorities on Campus: A Handbook for Enhancing Diversity. At ACE's 81st Annual Meeting, in February, 1999, a major plenary session was devoted to a presentation by Derek Bok and William G. Bowen, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, on their new book, The Shape of the River, which argues a strong case for the positive affects of affirmative action admissions programs on colleges and universities. Equally notably, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), which represents private and public liberal arts colleges and research universities dedicated to improving liberal education, has made diversity one of its major priorities for the nineties. With financial support from the Ford Foundation (which had begun its own diversity initiative in 1990) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the AAC&U formally launched its "American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy and Liberal Learning" initiative in 1993. This project focused on a series of reports published in 1995/1996. These reports explored diversity "in relation to educational missions and to the nation's democratic aspirations and values." In 1996 the AAC&U turned to the Internet and inaugurated "DiversityWeb," a website supported by the Ford Foundation and developed and maintained jointly by the AAC&U and the University of Maryland. At the same time, the AAC&U began the quarterly print publication of "Diversity Digest" (also available at the website) as a record and update of nationwide curricular innovations and other institutional diversity developments.
     The "American Commitments" project was based on the premise that "as higher education moves forward to affirm and enact a commitment to equality, fairness, and inclusion, it does so in a context of increasing racial and class separations and antagonisms." The project was thus dedicated to helping colleges and universities assure diversity in their campus communities while at the same time encouraging them to educate the larger communities of which they are parts. The four reports in the "American Commitments" series were: Volume I: The Drama of Diversity and Democracy: Higher Education and American Commitments (focused on the need for campuses to serve American democracy by making themselves "natural meeting places to explore [openly] America's conflicts over its diversity"); Volume II: Liberal Learning and the Arts of Connection for the New Academy (focused on the "New Academy" that has grown up on campuses in which teaching and learning "take into account the various [non-white and non-male] human histories typically omitted from traditional liberal arts disciplines"); Volume III: American Pluralism and the College Curriculum (illustrating how to change college curricula with examples of recently established diversity courses, requirements, and service learning opportunities); Volume IV: Diversity Works: The Emerging Picture of How Students Benefit (an overview of more than three hundred studies exploring the overwhelmingly positive impact of diversity on students). Questions of race and issues relating to underrepresented minorities surfaced as central themes in all of these reports. The AAC&U's most recent project, "Racial Legacies and Learning: An American Dialogue," launched in March, 1998 as part of the President's Initiative on Race and focused on campus-community dialogue, is the latest phase of the "American Commitments" project.
     "DiversityWeb" is a major website linking approximately 250 American colleges and universities engaged in "diversity work." It includes a World Wide Web home page containing information organized as follows: Leader's Guide, Work Rooms, Institution Profiles, Diversity Digest, Planning Manual, and Diversity Newsroom. Leader's Guide includes several strong examples of statements by colleges and universities (public and private) of their "Institutional Vision, Leadership, and Systemic Change." Work Rooms is a community bulletin board providing a live forum for the ongoing discussion of diversity issues. Institution Profiles lists all the schools which have agreed to create on-line "Campus Diversity Profiles" that when completed will provide "detailed information about the kinds of diversity work within which their faculty, administrators, staff and students are engaged." The individual profiles are currently at various stages of development but will all eventually be organized on three levels of detail. Level I will include "a brief statement describing a school's major diversity goals, objectives and activities, offices, programs and/or projects"; Level II will contain "more extensive descriptions under those priorities which have been especially strengthened by their campus efforts"; Level III (already provided by a number of institutions) are to be specific documents and policy papers which a particular campus "recognizes as important towards their diversity work."
Diversity Digest is the on-line version of the AAC&U's quarterly print newsletter. The electronic version includes both an "Issue Archive" (providing a guide to the contents of each issue) and a "Subject Archive" (providing an index to the collective volumes). Planning Manual is "a 'how-to' planning resource for administrators, faculty, and staff who want to create comprehensive, campus-wide diversity policies and initiatives using collaborative planning efforts at their respective institutions."Also available in print as Diversity Blueprint, the Planning Manual lists five "planning priorities" that are thought to facilitate constructive, diversity- promoting institutional change: Leadership and systemic change; Recruitment, retention, and affirmative action; Curriculum transformation; Campus-community connections; Faculty, staff involvement. Finally, Diversity Newroom is "an editorial resource for the media on campus diversity issues that are transforming higher education, the workplace, and the community." One example of what can be found in the Diversity Newsroom is a report, "Diversity and the College Curriculum," which lists, among other recent innovations, a course at the University of Michigan on "Intergroup Relations, Conflict and Community" and another at SUNY-Buffalo on "American Pluralism and the Search for Equality."
     Of the various institutions included among the "Campus Diversity Profiles," four seem particularly interesting for our purposes. Two are major private universities, Brown and Harvard. Two are important public universities, the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan. Michigan is particularly notable because it has persisted in its strong commitment to diversity despite major legal battles it has had to fight over its "affirmative action" admissions and hiring policies. We will survey each of them briefly in the pages that follow.
     Brown's profile begins with a quotation from the University's 1991 mission statement affirming "the value of diversity of backgrounds in promoting intellectual and personal growth." It also cites "Looking Toward the Year 2000: A Status Report on the Long-Term Planning Process at Brown University," which asserts a "commitment to maintaining and increasing diversity." Likewise highlighted is Brown's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, established in 1988. The Center brings together faculty from a variety of programs and departments, coordinates research on ethnic and racial minorities, and sponsors seminars, a colloquium series, public lectures, conferences, workshops, films, and a newsletter. In addition, Brown's President has appointed a Campus Minority Affairs Committee consisting of students, faculty and administrators who formally advise him on policies related to minority affairs. All Brown students are required to participate in a meeting chaired by the President during freshman orientation that "introduces them to Brown's institutional commitment to diversity and pluralism." This meeting is followed by a film and small group discussions led by trained faculty, student and staff facilitators. Throughout the year, follow-up activities meant to promote "racial and ethnic pluralism in the Brown community" are sponosored by the Third World Center and the dormitories.
     Brown has also introduced significant diversity perspective into its famously non-prescriptive curriculum. Starting in 1986, the Office of the Dean of the College each semester has identified courses relevant to American cultural diversity by labelling them "AMP" (American Minority Perspectives) courses. In 1988-1989 over 57% of Brown's undergraduates took at least one course reflecting minority or Third World perspectives, and in 1993-1994 AMP listings included 86 courses in 16 departments and programs. One of the major sources of expansion of AMP courses has been the "Odyssey program," begun in 1986 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, which brings together pairs of students and faculty during the summer to develop and revise courses by integrating racial and ethnic perspectives into them. From 1986 to 1992, 58% of the students who participated in the Odyssey curriculum development program were minority students. The Office of the Dean of the College has recently compiled a list of 170 courses in 22 departments and programs that focus on race and ethnicity, the experience of minority groups in America, or Latin American, Asian or African perspectives. In 1997 Brown established a new major in Ethnic Studies.
     Harvard's "Campus Diversity Profile" is most notable for a data-rich institutional profile, a strong statement of principle by President Neil Rudenstine ("Why a Diverse Student Body is so Important"), and a composite statement by several Harvard students ("Centralizing Multiculturalism"). The institutional profile reviews the history of Harvard's formal efforts to achieve diversity with its policies of nondiscrimination and affirmative action and presents the current numbers by racial and ethnic category and by gender for students, faculty, and administrative staff. Against this background, President Neil Rudenstine's statement offers a strong defense of Harvard's proactive affirmative action undergraduate admissions policy. He "respectfully and strongly" disagrees with judicial reasoning in the recent Hopwood v. State of Texas case in the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Fifth Circuit and reaffirms Harvard's commitment to Justice Lewis F. Powell's opinion in the Supreme Court's 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case. President Rudentstine commends Justice Powell for recognizing that "universities have a compelling interest in the educational benefits of a diverse student body." He adds that in its admissions process Harvard consciously considers "the 'mix' of the class as a whole, because we recognize how much our students' variety -- along many dimensions -- contributes to their education." President Rudenstine further notes that "race historically has been, and still remains, a powerful distinguishing feature in our society. ... Race remains a factor that significantly influences the process of growing up and living in the United States -- one that clearly plays a role in shaping the outlook and experiences of millions of Americans." As a consequence, "an applicant's race or ethnicity may be considered as one factor among the many considerations that go into assessing each applicant as a genuine individual -- as someone whose 'merit' cannot be measured purely in terms of numbers."
     Harvard's "Centralizing Multiculturalism" presents a students' perspective. It focuses on a proposal to create a multicultural student center on campus, an issue that has been considered for many years and actively debated since February, 1998 when the Harvard Undergraduate Council sponsored a panel discussion on the topic. The document offers the opinions of several students on whether or not the proposed multicultural center would really enhance the way Harvard's diverse students and groups interact with one another. One student, the co-president of the Minority Student Alliance, endorses the proposal because she believes the center will help overcome the "intense racial and ethnic separation" that currently defines actual campus life. Another student, a former chair of Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, reports that presently, on any given night, "six or seven ... groups might be meeting at the same time, oblivious to each other's activities." If these groups were all in the same building, "imagine the opportunity for interaction, for the exchange of ideas, for the development of friendships." A third student, the editorial chair of The Harvard Crimson, notes that while diversity is "the supposed hallmark of the Harvard experience" the real student experience at Harvard "is substantially more splintered, with members of almost all ethnicities (WASP included) clinging to each other in social circumstances." He endorses the creation of a multicultural center as "one way to achieve a level of comfort for minorities on campus ... [It] would allow for a casual, social interaction of the hearty individuals whom Harvard is attempting to foster in such a way that ethnicity would be acknowledged, and be of central concern, rather than the tacit factor it is in so many social organizations."
     The University of Maryland's "Campus Diversity Profile" begins with a dramatic confession of the institution's segregated past. As recently as 1969, the university had to be issued a desegregation order by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. Significant change began, however, in 1984 when Chancellor John Slaughter asked the University's College Park campus to become a "model multiracial, multicultural, and multigenerational academic community." University President William E. Kirwan strongly restated this commitment in his 1989 inaugural address in which he said: "At College Park, our efforts to build excellence are inextricably linked to our efforts to increase diversity. ... College Park must be a place were diversity is not only tolerated, but celebrated." Thus began the University of Maryland's "Diversity Initiative," formally launched in 1993-1994 and some of whose numerical results were clearly evident by 1995-1996, when African American students comprised 13.9% of the undergraduate population, Asian American students 15.1%, and Hispanic Americans 4.4%. At the same time, the University of Maryland had the largest number and percentage of Black faculty (153 and 6.6%) of any major American public university and conducted more research on diversity issues than any other higher educational institution in the country.
     Maryland's Diversity Initiative has evolved into a complex, multidimensional program administered by the Director of the Office of Human Relations Programs and by co-directors who serve as co-chairs of the seventy-member Steering Committee and as liaisons to the various subcommittees. There is also a ten-member Advisory Board chaired by the Executive Assistant to the President and consisting of the Vice President for Administrative Affairs, several deans and directors, faculty members, and representatives of the staff and students. The most important of the subcommittees are: the Program Development Committee (which sponsors spring and fall Diversity Focus weeks, presents annual diversity awards, and provides matching grants to campus units, student and staff organizations, and faculty for projects that "build community and collaboration"); the United Cultures Committee (which sponsors lectures, crosscultural workshops and other events, and mediates organizational disputes on campus); the Evaluation Committee (which evaluates ongoing campus programs and conducts surveys of cultural attitudes and campus climate); and the Diversity Database Committee (which coordinates on-line information resources). Diversity is defined broadly to include class, ethnicity, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, and disability status, and the Maryland Diversity Initiative is meant to promote a cultural transformation that is "permanently incorporated into the institutional fabric of the College Park Campus."
     Of particular relevance to undergraduate students are the Human Cultural Diversity Requirement courses. These are courses that focus primarily on: "(a) the history, status, treatment, or accomplishment of women or minority groups and subcultures; (b) non-Western culture; or (c) concepts and implications of diversity." Students must successfully complete at least one diversity course before they graduate, although many take more. To help develop courses that include "materials on women, gender, race, and other forms of diversity," faculty have been encouraged to participate in Summer Faculty Development Institutes as part of the University of Maryland's Curriculum Transformation Project. An extensive list of courses is already available, and some of the most successful of these are offered by the University's Afro-American Studies Program (AASP). AASP also offers a BA in two areas of concentration (Cultural and Social Analysis and Public Policy) and a certificate program which augments other disciplines and majors.
     The University of Michigan's "Campus Diversity Profile" -- the last to be reviewed here -- is notable in several respects. It begins with a bold, clear statement of the "Michigan Mandate," first articulated in 1988, to "make the University of Michigan a national and world academic leader in the racial and ethnic diversity of its faculty, students, and staff." But the Profile also indirectly acknowledges current legal and political difficulties by pointing out that "we are experiencing some leveling off in our efforts to represent African Americans in several key areas of the University." Compensating to some extent for this leveling off is the "Michigan Agenda for Women," announced in 1994 as an "inclusive plan which augments the Michigan Mandate ... [and] draws on the strengths of our diversity and ensures that all women at this institution are full beneficiaries of the various components of the plan." The Agenda's "Vision Statement" includes as a leading goal for the year 2,000 that the University of Michigan will become "the leader among American universities in promoting the success of women of diverse backgrounds as faculty, students, and staff."
     Michigan's Diversity Profile points with unalloyed pride to major advances in intergroup relations, curriculum transformation, and institutional innovation. The Program on Intergroup Relations and Conflict (IGRC) began the same year as the Michigan Mandate in an effort to educate the members of the University community about "forms of conflict among social groups." It consists of both curricular and co-curricular activities and promotes two major forms of learning: intergroup dialogues and academic courses. The intergroup dialogues are one-time, three- or seven-week, intensely interactive, "face-to-face meetings of two social identity groups" led by two trained student facilitators, one from each identity group. These dialogues "represent a unique opportunity for people from different backgrounds and cultural identities to learn about each others' histories and experiences, challenge stereotypes and misinformation, and constructively address issues of intergroup and intragroup conflict." The academic courses are credited, semester-long or mini-courses offered by the Sociology Department on such topics as "Introduction to Intergroup Relations and Conflict" and "Ethnic Identity and Intergroup Relations." Lectures, readings and written assignments in these courses are typically supplemented with discussions, experiential exercises and dialogue groups. An overarching goal of the IGRC program is to "promote a pedagogy of dialogue across differences which emphasizes constructive approaches to intergroup communication and conflict while acknowledging issues of power, privilege and oppression."
     The University of Michigan has also undertaken a major, diversity-related curriculum change. Starting in 1991, all undergraduates in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts have to take as a graduation requirement at least one "Race or Ethnicity" (ROE) course that "addresses issues arising from racial intolerance." Courses qualifying for the ROE designation must provide discussion of: "(1) the meaning of race, ethnicity, and racism; (2) racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality as it occurs in the United States or elsewhere; (3) comparisons of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, social class, or gender." By 1994, over 125 ROE courses had been approved by the Curriculum Committee of the College. In that same year, 7,761 student spaces were available in ROE courses overall. A student-faculty-administration committee recommended in March 1995 that the courses be continued with some modifications and improvements and additional budgetary support.
     In 1987 the University of Michigan created the Office of the Associate Provost for Academic and Multicultural Affairs (OAPAMA), as a "reflection of the high value the University places on diversity." Reporting directly to the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, OAPAMA supervises several important offices and departments, including the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, the Office of Financial Aid, the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, and the Office of New Student Programs. In addition, OAPAMA sponsors a number of faculty grant and award programs as a way to facilitate the "infusion of multicultural content and intellectual diversity into the teaching and research activities of the faculty." It offers, for example, Faculty Awards for Research and Creative Projects, which can include grants for co-sponsoring symposia, conferences and colloquia, student research assistance, and research and professional travel. Since 1996 OAPAMA has likewise offered five annual Diversity Service Awards of $5,000 each to full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty who show "commitment to the centrality of diversity as an important part of the University's educational mission" or who demonstrate "efforts to bring about constructive change on issues regarding diversity within his or her academic unit and/or the University.
     However different they may be in many ways, all four of these institutions -- Brown, Harvard, Maryland, and Michigan -- have made the admission of increased numbers of underrepresented minorities a clear and central priority. One of the four reports continuing progress in this area (Maryland), two are ambiguous (Brown and Harvard), and one acknowledges some decline (Michigan). This suggests that certain institutions are achieving greater success or having fewer political and legal difficulties in this area than others. Such a conclusion is consistent with the report on undergraduate admission trends in the nation's highest ranked colleges and universities published in the Autumn 1997 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. That report noted that nine of the twenty-six leading colleges showed gains in black enrollments and twelve showed no gains or losses, while five of the twenty-six leading universities showed gains and eleven showed losses. Reasons for these trends are at present unclear, but the implications for diversity are apparent. Unless colleges and universities maintain or improve their recruitment of underrepresented minority students, the cause of diversity in higher education will suffer substantially, whatever else institutions may or may not do in their attempts to transform campus climate or alter institutional culture.
     The November 1997 issue of Black Issues in Higher Education reported that many institutions across the country have been courageous and ingenious in their commitment to diversity, even in the currently cool political and legal climate. Georgia Tech, for example, maintains several three-two "dual degree" programs with historically Black colleges that help feed its engineering and science majors and thus boost its impressive number of minority graduates in engineering and computer science. Smith College, now headed by the first African American woman to lead one of the Seven Sister colleges, maintains similar partnerships with a large number of community colleges. The University of Virginia, once a strictly segregated institution, now graduates Black students at the highest rate of any public university in the country, aided by its student mentor and parents' advisory programs.
     Institutional diversity practices -- and their successes and failures -- are discussed not only on "DiversityWeb" and in higher education journals such as the two cited above but in an impressive variety of national conferences. The following is a sampling of the conferences held just in the eight months from April to November, 1998: "Diversity, Learning, and Instutional Change," sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in April; "Eleventh National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education," sponsored by the Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies in May; "Fourth Annual Diversity Education Institute," sponsored by Texas A&M University in July; "Keeping Our Faculties: Addressing the Recruitment and Retention of Faculty of Color in Higher Education," sponsored by the University of Minnesota in October; and "Diversity and Learning: Identity, Community, and Intellectual Development," sponsord by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in November. At these conferences, speakers presented the latest national and local institutional data as well as research findings on the benefits of diversity for the campus learning environment; they also offered insights on legal trends and tactics, highlighted the most effective approaches to curriculum innovation, and advertised the best intervention strategies for improving campus inter-group communication.
     To complete our quick survey of the national scene mention should be made of various video resources, which are now readily available and are often shown or show-cased at diversity conferences. Among the most uniformly praised are the following: "Ethnic Notions," a 56-minute, Emmy Award-winning film tracing the evolution of Black stereotypes in American culture; "Shattering the Silences," a highly acclaimed perspective on campus life through the eyes of minority faculty, produced with major funding from the Ford Foundation; "Blacks and Jews," an 86-minute film made collaboratively by Jewish and Black filmmakers probing the sources of anger and mutual distrust; "Skin Deep," a 56-minute film aired on PBS, which "follows the eye-opening journey of an often contentious, multi-cultural group of college students as they awkwardly but honestly reveal their prejudices, bare their wounds and try to understand each other"; and "Why Can't We Talk About Race?", a 59-minute video produced by the AAC&U as part of its "Racial Legacies and Learning" initiative. These video resources, often accompanied by detailed discussion guides and facilitator manuals, have been used effectively on campuses around the country as centerpieces of structured intergroup diversity exercises.

Historical Perspective

     We now turn to the University of Rochester, where our first, almost instantaneous discovery was that our institution is not linked to AAC&U's "DiversityWeb," has no official institutional statement of diversity ideals or principles, and provides no easily accessible institutional diversity data. Our second discovery, which took longer to register, was that while many individuals and offices at UR have clear diversity intentions and initiate, even sustain impressive diversity efforts, our University, overall, has no consistent diversity policy and no articulated consensus that such a policy is desirable. It is our judgment that this lack of top-to-bottom institutional diversity focus reduces the effectiveness of whatever efforts are currently underway. It is also our judgment that the best way to understand the University's current status is to view it as the product of historical circumstances.
     To gain historical perspective we began by looking at the University's first attempts, starting in the 1960s, to admit and retain underrepresented minority students. We pieced together the history of these attempts from successive editions of the Official Bulletin of the University of Rochester, Undergraduate Studies, runs of the Interpres yearbook, back issues of Currents and the Campus Times, University "Fact Books" maintained by the Office of Financial Planning and Institutional Studies, and immersion in the Minutes of the Faculty Senate going back to 1963. We were also aided by historical reflections provided by Frederick C. Jefferson, Jr., longtime University official with responsibilities in this area and currently Professor in the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development. The committee is, of course, wholly responsible for the historical narrative in the pages that follow, which it offers in good conscience as the most plausible reconstruction of relevant events derivable from the information available to it.
     What emerges from historical review is that although the University conferred a bachelor's degree on its first African American graduate in 1891, it was not until the late 1960s that it saw the need for a deliberate policy for the recruitment of minority students. The Official Bulletin for 1969-1970 makes clear how this change took place in the following paragraph addded to the section on admissions: "Educational Opportunity Program. Candidates for admission from minority and/or low income groups are encouraged to investigate the opportunities available under the Educational Opportunity Program which provides special remedial and tutoring assistance, reduced academic load, and financial aid." This new paragraph reveals the assumption that specially recruited minority students would not be able to meet normal admissions criteria, would uniformly require remedial academic assistance, would be of low socioeconomic status, and would come exclusively from New York State. The immediate bases for launching EOP were Federal and New York State legislative action creating "educational opportunity" funds; behind this lay, of course, the Civil Rights movement and the pressure and moral urgency of related political events.
     The University of Rochester began the active recruitment of African American students who met the EOP criteria during the 1967/1968 admissions cycle and, in addition, hired a recent African American graduate for the summer of 1968 to aid in longer-term recruitment efforts. In September, 1968 the University made its first offer (initially accepted on October 2) for the combined position of Assistant Director of Admissions and Coordinator of the Educational Opportunity Program. The Faculty Senate Minutes for October 7, 1968 make clear some of the positive faculty reaction to these events:

... Mr. Gove [of the University-Community Affairs Subcommittee] outlined the inadequate situation with regard to black students at this University in the past, and summarized the positive changes that have occurred since discussion last year: (1) The Admissions Office has been successful in seeking out more black students than ever before for this year's freshman class. (2) An Admissions Officer who is black has been added to become primarily involved in recruiting black students. ... [Mr. Alexis commented] that there are 22 black students in the freshman class this year as against 2 black students in the whole student body six years ago. ...

     Despite these signs of administrative effort and faculty support, the first year of the Educational Opportunity Program did not go well. By early 1969, the administration had split the original major staff position into two (one for student recruitment and the other for EOP coordination), but both remained vacant and neither long-term recruitment efforts nor immediate student counseling and support needs were being adequately served. Moreover, the faculty in the College of Arts and Science proved slow in responding to student and administration calls for curricular innovation and academic flexibility. Student frustrations built and led on the evening of March 4/5 to a Black Students Union-led takeover of the third and fourth floors of the Frederick Douglass Building. Student "wants" included: the immediate hiring of an admissions recruiter and a program coordinator; the recruitment of greater numbers of black students in the next admissions cycle (aiming at 100 black freshmen by September, 1969); providing adequately budgeted special services (financial aid and personal counseling, summer preparatory programs, tutoring, academic coordination of more flexible and extended courses of study); the significant addition of black faculty and staff; academic innovation (black studies in the curriculum and expanded library resources including books on black subjects or by black authors); improved service to the local black community and improved opportunities for the University's own black employees. In discussions with both the faculty and representatives of the Black Students Union the administration acknowledged the reasonableness of the students' concerns and pledged intensified efforts to achieve commonly held goals. On March 10, the students vacated the Faculty Club after announcing that "the University has agreed to the sentiments and aims underlying our proposals."
     The skirmish in March, 1969 did not really resolve many issues, however, and continuing turbulence and instability characterized EOP during the next several years. During the spring and summer of 1969 the University failed to achieve its upwardly adjusted goal of 100 black freshmen and instead succeeded in enrolling only 45. In January, 1970 Sproull expressed concerns about the cost and effectiveness of EOP and wondered whether the University might be "better off saving some resources for helping these same people, and graduates from similar programs elsewhere, when they reach graduate and professional work?" Two months later, Sproull told the Faculty Senate that "the current crisis in the Educational Opportunities [sic] Program has resulted in the University's acceptance of the resignation of its director." Vice President for Student Affairs Frank Dowd added that "it was clear that the difficulties in the EOP at present have made for a number of deficiencies this year." College of Arts and Science Associate Dean Arthur Goldberg, in his report for the Committee on Academic Affairs to the Faculty Senate on May 4, 1970, stated that "the central problem [in EOP] was the quality of guidance and counselling ... We are not alone in our concern. Similar concerns were expressed by ... the officers of the Black Student Union." In May, 1971 it was reported to the Faculty Senate that black sophomores were having trouble finding departments of concentration. In response to this problem, Sproull (UR President at the time) acknowledged that "a student who, whether or not he has taken an underload, has a flat C average, may be looked upon by one department as pretty unpromising material for a major in that department, and if he approaches another department he may again find a negative reaction." In October, 1972 Sproull somewhat wistfully expressed his hope that "incorporaton of Educational Opportunity Program academic advising into the Arts and Science Dean's Office ... will strengthen the Educational Opportunity Program."
     The UR administration undertook a more systematic review of EOP in 1973. A three-member committee consisting of Sproull, Dowd and Goldberg headed the effort, Goldberg serving as spokesman in a progress report to the Faculty Senate on March 5. Goldberg emphasized appropriate criteria for admission (the UR wanted higher SAT cutoffs while New York State officials insisted on what Goldberg thought were unacceptably low ones) and the merits of the pre-freshman summer program. He thought that the summer program, which highlighted basic skills courses in reading and mathematics taught by regular College faculty, was perhaps the greatest strength of EOP. In fact, EOP might reduce its high attrition rate and work more effectively overall if the summer program served a screening function or, at least, as a systematic "guide to intelligent planning of programs in the freshman year." Later in 1973 the University recruited Frederick Jefferson to serve as the new EOP director (its fifth). Jefferson had no difficulty accepting Goldberg's basic recommendations, especially about the centrality of the summer program, and provided EOP with the stability and administrative leadership it needed. He worked well with Dowd to whom he reported, and in a few years, as head of a new Office of Special Student Services, added administrative responsibility for special support services and international students to his continuing leadership of EOP.
     Yet if the Educational Opportunity Program achieved stability under Jefferson it was also subtly marginalized and made increasingly invisible in the overall University structure as the program for "special admits." It all but disappeared as a topic of discussion at Faculty Senate meetings even when undergraduate admissions served as the focus, as was often the case in the seventies as the UR became more anxious about "positioning" itself most effectively in the increasingly competitive admissions market. When, for example, new Director of Undergraduate Admissions Timothy Scholl reported to the Faculty Senate on September 26, 1978 he made no mention of EOP or of minority students in general in his lengthy presentation on the challenges facing his office. The marginalization of minority students was also reflected in seemingly slight but cumulatively significant shifts in the section on admissions in successive editions of the Official Bulletin. Beginning in 1974-1975, transfer and foreign students got considerably more attention, a development that was long overdue and which this Committee heartily applauds. At the same time, however, minority students were now mentioned in just two sentences: "The University is committed to providing opportunities to minority group and educationally disadvantaged students for intellectual growth and achievement. A network of support services including financial aid, academic advising, tutoring, and career counseling is available for this purpose." In 1977-1978 these two sentences disappear and the only (brief) reference to minority students in that and succeeding Bulletins occurs in the section on student life.
     Official data about freshman cohorts (available at two year intervals beginning in 1974) present an overall admissions picture for these years [Freshman totals include Eastman School of Music students. Numbers in parentheses are percentages of the freshman cohort for that year]:

	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 serious consideration. Because by this time we were also already committed to historical work, we were encouraged by a sentence in the first paragraph of Chapter 2 ("Conducting an Institutional Audit"): "Your current situation is most meaningful when considered in relation to past achievements and failures." Proceeding further in the chapter, however, proved discouraging. Institutions are urged to develop two checklists, one of "Institutional Policies" and another of "Institutional Procedures." Below are representative questions from each.

Checklist of Institutional Policies

-- Is increasing minority participation an institutional priority? Has the governing board approved a policy designed to increase minority participation? Does it include specific goals? Has it been presented to the entire campus community?

-- Are there regular reviews of institutional progress by the president and board?

-- Are there individuals in various units or schools designated to identify and document problem areas and to recommend a course of action?

-- Are there routine collections of data on minority participation and dissemination of that data to the campus community?

-- Are admissions criteria and practices reviewed periodically to determine if they are consonant with increasing minority enrollments?

-- Are dormitory and campus life activities reviewed periodically to determine if they are consonant with the institutional effort to provide a climate that respects a pluralistic culture?

Checklist of Institutional Procedures

-- Is there a person designated to monitor the campus climate with respect to racial tolerance?

-- Does each department or school conduct a periodic assessment of its efforts to improve minority participation and its progress to date?

-- Do schools or units use advisory committees to identify ways to expand contacts in the minority community and to strengthen efforts to recruit minority students, faculty, and administrators? Do they use minority professional associations? minority disciplinary associations? contacts with deans and department heads at historically black institutions?

-- Does institutional publicity portray minorities in a manner consistent with the goals of enhancing minority participation? Is there a process for reviewing publications and advising on their compatibility with institutional goals?

-- Are employment practices and advancement procedures reviewed periodically to assess their impact on minority faculty and staff? Do special efforts and programs exist to identify promising minority professionals and to assist in their career advancement?

     As a committee exercise, we decided to pool our knowledge and attempt collectively to answer these questions. We discovered rather quickly that, to the best our ability, we would have to answer most questions either "No" or "Don't Know." We also discovered that, to the best of our knowledge, the University has never conducted a formal audit such as described in the Handbook and that to do one correctly would require more time and resources than we had available. This suggested to us that our audit process would be better served by a less formal and more flexible procedure. We decided on a series of interviews and discussions with a number of key institutional representatives and with students and student organizations. We also decided to learn what we could about certain University policies and initiatives and to monitor campus climate by reading student publications and keeping track of major incidents and events. We acknowledge that our audit methods were not systematic enough to be considered rigorous nor extensive enough to be judged exhaustive, but we believe that we have produced a useful and revealing snapshot of the campus status quo.
     In addition to Frederick Jefferson who, as mentioned earlier, helped us with historical background, we interviewed or had extensive conversations with the following individuals: Provost Charles Phelps; Dean of Undergraduate Enrollment Policy and Management Neill Sanders (accompanied by then Director of River Campus Admissions Wayne Locust and Director of Financial Aid Andrea Leithner); Director of Student Activities/Wilson Commons Robert Rouzer; Director of Residential Life Logan Hazen; and Residential Life staff member Viki Cvitkovic. We began each conversation by asking that person what he or she meant by "diversity" and what the principal issues and problems associated with it at UR seemed to be. We now review the highlights of these conversations.
     Our conversation with Provost Phelps began with his clear indication of the importance of diversity to the University and its students. When our students graduate, he noted, they will enter a world filled with people of a "dizzying variety of backgrounds." Provost Phelps acknowledged that the University of Rochester was a signatory to the April 14, 1997 statement of the Association of American Universities ("On the Importance of Diversity in University Admissions"), which we quoted on an early page of this report. He applauded the goals of our committee and expressed his hope that what we recommend will help the University better achieve diversity.
     Other parts of our conversation, however, had a different tone. Provost Phelps acknowledged that, despite its merits, the goal of diversity was, in some areas, very difficult to attain. There are difficulties, for example, in the recruitment of an increasingly diverse faculty despite the clear instructions he provides to search committees and deans, his use of special search consultants, and his readiness to use Provost's start-up funds to assist in the hiring of minority faculty. The underlying difficulty is a possible conflict in University goals: between increasing faculty diversity on the one hand and maintaining financial viability on the other. Similarly with regard to student recruitment, the University has to struggle with the tension between the desirability of an increasingly diverse student body and the impact that might have on the University's finances.
     Phelps directed a major part of our conversation to another difficulty threatening the goal of diversity in undergraduate admissions: the current legal climate. Pointing to recent court cases in Texas and Michigan that challenged affirmative action admissions procedures, Provost Phelps remarked that "the legal environment changed very precipitously under our feet." He noted that after the famous Hopwood (Texas) case Rice University in Houston felt compelled to revise its admissions practices, with a resulting drop of 50% in minority enrollment. At the University of Rochester, we have eliminated a "differential" in advertising for Rush Rhees scholars, and , as a result, the number of minority students in the Rush Rhees group dropped by 20-25%.
     Provost Phelps indicated that the University's counsels were working hard on the legal issues although much remained unclear. It is not yet certain where the "safe harbors" will be, and a great deal will depend on the evolution of case law. The assumption among provosts and legal scholars around the country, however, is that the current environment and the constraints resulting from it will only get worse. Since minority student applications have been down nationwide for the last several years, the situation, overall, does not bode well.
     Our conversation with Enrollments Dean Sanders touched on several of the same issues we had already discussed with Provost Phelps. For example, Dean Sanders pointed to the current legal environment and noted that because of it universities were no longer able to offer explicitly race-based scholarships. While UR still offers admission to any minority applicant who in our judgment can succeed academically at the University and while we still try to provide as attractive needs-based financial aid packages as possible, we have experienced a marked decline in minority applications in recent years, especially from African American males. Because this is part of a national trend, the UR now faces ferocious competition for the declining number of applicants in the underrepresented minority pool. Among New York State schools, NYU and Columbia have been particularly aggressive, and Cornell has suffered as well as UR.
     Dean Sanders also discussed what he thinks is a nationwide trend for African American students to enroll increasingly in traditionally black colleges and universities. The reason for this trend seems to be that these students now believe they will feel more comfortable at traditionally black schools. Partly in response to this trend and partly as a general step-up of our minority recruitment efforts, the UR has become more aggressive in its outreach efforts. Boston, New York City and Philadelphia have been special recruitment targets, and there are plans to establish regional admissions offices in Atlanta, in the Great Lakes metropolitan areas, and in the the San Diego-Seattle corridor. In addition, Dean Sanders reported that the Admissions Office has been building relationships with Urban Leagues around the country and has been enlisting the aid of our own minority undergraduates as voluntary recruiting "ambassadors." Whether our current students will volunteer with enthusiasm and in significant numbers and whether minority recruitment efforts in general will succeed in reversing the downward enrollment trend of recent years remain open questions.
     The conversation with Robert Rouzer shifted attention from recruitment and admissions to the University's efforts at fostering a sense of individual belonging and intergroup understanding once students actually arrive and begin to take part in campus life. We briefly discussed the pre-freshman Summer Orientation Program (SOP) and the "Freshman Focus" sessions during "Yellowjacket Days," the six-day period between new students' moving onto campus for the fall semester and the start of classes. University diversity efforts here consist primarily in close attentiveness to the choice of a heterogeneous and representative group of student summer orientation advisors (SAs) and dormitory resident advisors (RAs); these efforts generally seem to have been successful in recent years. The "Welcome Assembly" centerpiece of SOP is another intended occasion for creating a sense of inclusion in a diverse campus community, but in the judgment of our committee this is an opportunity largely missed. Rouzer felt, in general, that orientation activities failed to achieve many of their intended purposes because too much happens in too short a time and because students are not really ready for all the messages transmitted. Rouzer still has faith, however, in an exercise in multicultural understanding scheduled during Yellowjacket Days and built around the viewing and discussion of a 1-hour film, "Frosh," made at Stanford in 1990-1991. The film raises three diversity issues (race, gender, and sexual orientation). It is shown to the group as a whole and then followed by breakout discussions led by RAs. According to our student members, the film is generally perceived as stale and dated and discussion tends to get "blown off."
     Most of the conversati

Report of the Residential College Commission Subcommittee on Diversity

March, 1999

Report of the Residential College Commission
Subcommittee on Diversity