Race and the University: Why Social Justice
Leads to Academic Excellence
The Seattle Times Company Editorials & Opinion
Sunday, March 19, 2000 by Richard McCormick Special to The Times
In September 1999, in the wake of the passage of Initiative 200, the number of new underrepresented minority freshmen at the University of Washington fell from 373 to 255, or from 8.8 percent of the class to 5.6 percent - a drop of almost 32 percent.
These are not huge numbers, but they are significant. Although 30 years of affirmative action had not succeeded in making our campus truly representative of Washington's population, we were within reasonable hailing distance. For example, 3.4 percent of the state's population is African American, and 2.9 percent of our 1998 freshmen were African American. Now the freshman figure is 1.8 percent.
Even in a class of 4,500, the presence of those minority students can make a difference. If our previous trends had continued, one out of every 11 classmates that a freshman encountered would be black or Hispanic or American Indian; but now, the number is only one in every 18. Affirmative action is about numbers. On one side, we have numbers that describe the racial and ethnic makeup of our population. On the other side we have numbers that describe academic achievement. Affirmative action in college admissions, and all the other measures that have supplemented it and may now supplant it, are attempts to mediate between those two sets of numbers. Why do we want to do this? Why is diversity so important in higher education?
Social justice: It is simply unacceptable, on moral grounds, that educational opportunity should be less open to some groups in our society than to others. It is an affront to what our country stands for. We have a particular obligation to African Americans, who suffered more than two centuries of slavery and another century of overt prejudice and legal discrimination.
Social and economic health: We cannot afford to waste the talents of any of our citizens, and we cannot afford the social unrest and divisiveness that flow from unequal opportunity.
Educational excellence: Diversity has important educational benefits in and of itself. Students learn from one another, both in the classroom and outside. Affirmative action, begun in the 1960s, was a national decision that the demands of racial equity outweighed the principle of color-blindness. But national ambivalence remained, and for many people, it was and is a personal ambivalence. It is a mistake to view all claims of principle from opponents of affirmative action as merely cynical and self-serving. Moreover, there was always implicit in affirmative action the promise that we would solve the problem and move on. After more than 30 years, we haven't solved the problem, but the public has evidently decided that it's time to move on. In Washington state, analysis of the I-200 vote indicated that the voters understood what they were doing.
I believe that affirmative action is still our best tool for achieving equality and diversity. But I don't take the passage of I-200 as evidence that the American people have lost interest in social justice. In both Texas and Florida, where affirmative action now is or soon will be illegal, state governments have directed universities to admit all students graduating in the top 10 or 20 percent of their high-school class. This is surely a sign that elected officials know they will be in trouble with voters if public universities end up as exclusive white enclaves. So, if the public still wants colleges and universities that look like our increasingly diverse society, but no longer wants us to use race and ethnicity as explicit factors in admissions, how do we achieve the goal?
Changing the way we do things. To answer that question, we at the UW have had to think in three different time frames. First was the immediate future, for which the main tools would be changes in admissions criteria and vigorous recruiting. In the mid-term, we needed to work in and with schools and communities to find, encourage and develop promising minority students. And long-range, the issues were big and basic: school reform and the persistence of academic underachievement among too many minority youngsters. Even before I-200 passed, we started working on admissions criteria that might mitigate its impact. The loaded word "merit" is central here. Do grades and test scores really or fully measure academic merit? About two-thirds of our freshman class - those applicants with the strongest academic records - are admitted on the basis of grades and test scores alone, and the remaining third is admitted after careful individual review, in which additional factors are taken into account. We think this formula, for a large public university, gets it about right. For the third of the class admitted after review of additional factors, I-200 meant that race and ethnicity could no longer be counted as "plus factors" for ranking applicants. So our new criteria specified "personal factors" that we hoped might capture minority students - such things as economic and educational disadvantage, cultural awareness, overcoming personal adversity, school adversity and leadership awards and achievement. Despite the new criteria, our enrollment of underrepresented minority freshmen dropped by 32 percent in 1999. Besides rethinking admissions, our other short-term efforts center mainly on recruiting. We know there are qualified minority students who don't know enough about the UW, or are unsure if they're welcome, or are being wooed by other schools. They are the targets of a greatly stepped-up recruiting effort. Here are a few highlights of that effort:
We sent 43,000 letters to qualified students in the West, of whom 13,000 were minorities, and we've had an encouragingly high return rate for the enclosed postcards. Letters signed by me were sent to 1,200 minority students with SAT scores of 1,200 or higher.
We've hired two new counselors to represent the UW at high schools in Seattle and Tacoma, each counselor working with five schools.
UW minority students are increasing their presence in area high schools.
We've created a new staff position in student outreach and community relations, which has greatly increased our access to and interaction with a wide range of minority groups.
We've established a UW Center on the campus of Heritage College in Eastern Washington, an independent college that serves primarily Indian and Hispanic students in the agricultural Yakima Valley.
With some senior colleagues, I recently visited two community colleges to meet with minority students there and explore the barriers they perceived to transferring to the UW. The knowledge we gained will translate into efforts to overcome those barriers.
Our Office of Minority Affairs, in collaboration with various student organizations, is hosting hundreds of overnight visits on the UW campus for minority high-school and community-college students. Financial aid is a key consideration for many minority students. Over the years, the UW has accepted private contributions targeted for minority scholarships. Our Board of Regents approved an innovative new plan that provides a menu of options for awarding scholarships to minority students. Identify talented minority students Short-term measures are necessary, but I think our most fruitful strategies are likely to be those I've called "mid-term" - working in and with the schools to identify talented minority students, mentor and encourage them, raise their sights, enrich their educational menus, make sure they're on a college-preparatory track. Here is just a sampling:
Since 1995, our Office of Minority Affairs has run a program in nine middle schools called Early Scholars Outreach Program (ESOP). Its goal is to maximize the number of minority students who enter ninth grade enrolled in a college-preparatory curriculum. It offers twice-weekly tutorial sessions, UW campus visits, field trips, workshops and finally a six-week summer bridge program before high school, with training in language arts, math, computers and study skills.
Our College of Engineering started its statewide MESA program (Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement) in 1982 to provide enriching opportunities in those fields for underrepresented students in grades six through 12. In the 1997-98 school year, MESA served 4,100 students in 65 schools around the state and 91 percent of MESA high-school seniors went on to college. Now, building on the successful strategies of MESA and other College of Engineering diversity programs, several UW schools and colleges have embarked on what they are calling a Diversity Scale-Up Project. This effort will target Washington state middle and high schools with a high percentage of racial and ethnic minorities.
For seven years, our Biology Program has run two intensive four-week summer sessions on campus for promising minority or disadvantaged high-school students. The program is small, but almost all participants go on to become college science or engineering students.
This is the pilot year for a new program called STEP - the Sciences and Tribes Educational Partnership - in which the UW is working with the Quinault Tribe and the Taholah School District on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. The program will ultimately include six tribes. I have deliberately left too little space for the truly long-range questions, because they are so difficult, and I don't know the answers. Schools being asked to improve There are two big and interconnected issues here: overall school reform and the problem that many minority students underachieve in the academic sphere. School reform means different things to different people, but there is undeniably a nationwide movement for changing K-12 education - for beefing-up the curriculum, for expecting more of both teachers and students and for new formulas to test whether our children are learning the right things and learning them well enough. The state of Washington is very much part of that reform movement. The state's new Essential Academic Learning Requirements and Washington Assessment of Student Learning tests, now being phased in, are evidence that here, as elsewhere, schools are being called on to do a better job.
Universities can and must involve themselves in improving the public schools. At the UW, we embraced this responsibility before I-200 was even on the horizon. You may have read about our new Institute for K-12 Leadership, to be headed by former New York schools Chancellor Rudy Crew. But universities can't do it all. There is that second large hurdle: the persistence of underachievement by some minorities. The problem was highlighted in a report from the College Board this past October. "It is particularly troubling," says the report, "because we are not just talking about disadvantaged youngsters. Even minority students from relatively wealthy families with well-educated parents do not typically perform as well as white and Asian students from similar backgrounds." Not surprisingly, given the unique history in this country of African Americans, they are the farthest behind. We don't really know all the factors involved, but we do know that, for too many black youngsters, doing well in school is stigmatized as "acting white."
If we can take any solace from the loss of affirmative action, it is that all of us may now finally have to face up to these two intractable problems. Along with the rest of American society, universities are up against issues from which they were largely insulated by affirmative action. We have failed to make our schools good enough and we have failed to ensure truly equal opportunities for our minority citizens. Affirmative action was a way around those failures - a useful and even indispensable path for many. But now that detour is closing, and together we must finally get serious about building a better road.
Richard McCormick is president of the University of Washington. This essay is excerpted from remarks delivered to the Association of American Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C.