UD told to improve student diversity now

The University of Delaware has tried for decades to make its campus more diverse.

But some lawmakers and civil rights leaders say the school still has a long way to go – especially when it comes to African Americans.

The General Assembly allocated $200,000 in June to hire an independent consultant to study the school’s hiring and student recruitment practices, and to make recommendations for how it can be handled better.

“When you look at their numbers, it is clear that they are vacillating along a line that’s simply unacceptable in this day and age,” state Sen. Harris McDowell, co-chair of of the powerful budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, said at a Friday press briefing. “I don’t want to de-emphasize that it’s a difficult issue. But we just have to get those diversity numbers up.”

McDowell and other state leaders came together to say, unequivocally, that it is untenable for the state’s flagship university to have only one in 20 students enrolled be black when one in five residents statewide are black. That’s especially true, McDowell points out, when state taxpayers annually hand the school millions of dollars – $120 million in the most recent budget passed in June.

“All our students, including our minority students, need to see a path forward at UD,” said Sen. Margaret Rose Henry. “Many of our students in Delaware are not able to attend their own state school.”

Calls for change are welcome to students like Jasmine Anthony, a Sussex County native who is used to finding herself the only black student in any class.

“I sometimes feel like, whenever I speak out in class, I’m not just speaking for me, I’m speaking for all black people,” said Anthony, who’s majoring in black studies and political science. “I have to be very careful what I say, because everyone is looking at me like, ‘This is what all black people think.’”

UD grad Carl Suddler knows precisely what Anthony is talking about. He calls it “being speaker for your race.”

“As a student, it puts you in this position where you’re more cautious, you’re timid, you don’t want to say the wrong thing,” said Suddler, who graduated from Glasgow High School. “You feel like everybody’s looking at you.”

Several black students said they’ve rarely encountered outright, flagrant racism at UD, though incidents do happen. Anthony says she once had a racial slur shouted at her from a passing car, and one of Anthony’s friends said she had the same N-word hollered at her by a white person who tossed a chicken nugget while she walked down a sidewalk.

Last year, when UD played Delaware State University, a historically-black university, racial insults spread on the social media app Yik Yak, drawing condemnation from top UD officials.

Yasser Payne, a professor of black studies at UD, often tells black students that adjusting to college life will take more effort for them than it will for white students.

“Your biggest challenge will not actually be drilling down and doing the work, attending class, doing papers,” Payne said. “Your biggest challenge will be with contending with the culture of this place. It will be trying to get the jokes, to find out when it is appropriate to speak or not to speak.”

Patrick Harker, UD’s president the past eight years, is leaving to lead the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, putting the university at a crossroads as it selects his replacement.

“One of the biggest things we need to address is diversity,” said Robert Opila, the incoming president of the Faculty Senate and a member of the search committee. “The student body isn’t diverse. The faculty isn’t diverse. But the state of Delaware has a sizable African American population. It has to change.”

Opila points to a Middle States Commission on Higher Education review of UD released in 2012 that praised UD for many things, but found it lacking on diversity.

“UD is not diverse in either absolute or relative terms,” the report said. “With few exceptions, we believe that the university trails its peers in every measure of diversity in every constituency of the institution.”

In the fall of 2014, more than 76 percent of UD’s undergraduate students were white. About 5 percent of undergraduates were black, 7 percent were Hispanic, and 4.5 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander. Foreign students, Native Americans and multiracial students made up the remaining 7.5 percent.

By contrast, 64 percent of Delaware’s population is white, 22 percent is black, 8 percent is Hispanic and 3.7 percent is Asian, Census figures from 2013 show. Native Americans and multiracial citizens make up the remaining 2.3 percent.

“It’s not like we’re in Minnesota,” said Leland Ware, a black professor who has taught at UD 15 years. “We are between Baltimore and Philadelphia, where there are large black middle classes.”

Between 1998 and 2014, the percentage of Hispanic students at the school leaped from 2.4 in 1998 to more than 7.

Maria Matos, president of the Latin American Community Center, credited Harker’s predecessor, David Roselle, with helping build the Hispanic student body by hiring upper-level administrators, like the provost and admissions staff, who were Hispanic.

“If there’s diversity at the table when people are making decisions, there are different perspectives,” Matos said. “If you don’t have those perspectives, it’s difficult to make decisions that lead to diversity.”

Asian students’ share increased from 2.6 percent to 4.6 percent between 1998 and 2014.

Palash Gupta, President of the Delaware Asian American Business Association, believes more Asian students are attending UD because more Asian families are coming to Delaware. Over the past few decades, Gupta said, immigrants flocked to the U.S. to receive training in burgeoning engineering and computer science fields – and children of those immigrants followed in their parents’ footsteps.

“Delaware is definitely one of those places where there is opportunity,” Gupta said.

While Hispanic and Asian students have seen steady gains, the percentage of black students has stubbornly stayed around five percent for decades. In 1998, 5.8 percent of students were black; in 2014, that number was around 5.1.

James Jones, Director of the Center for the Study of Diversity at UD, says cost is often a factor, because black families generally have lower incomes than white families. The K-12 school system, he points out, also continues to see achievement gaps between white and black students, meaning fewer black students reach the admissions bar. And those that excel may go elsewhere.

“Those black students who are well-prepared and have the economic wherewithal have a lot of options, so we are really competing heavily with other institutions for them,” Jones said.

Nationally, there were 17.5 million undergraduates in 2013, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Of those, 56 percent were white, while almost 2.6 million – about 15 percent – were black. The number of black students nationally doubled between 1990 and 2013.

Other regional institutions have higher proportions of black students: last school year, the University of Maryland was 12.7 percent black, Rutgers was 10 percent black and the University of Pennsylvania was 7.1 percent black.

UD’s 5.1 percent was higher than Penn State’s 3.8 percent.

Schools nationwide that set similar entrance requirements to UD were slightly more diverse. About 7 percent of students were black, according to U.S. Department of Education Data analyzed by Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

These comparisons hardly mean UD is alone in having a less-than-diverse student body. In fact, many schools that require high test scores and GPAs have largely white, affluent populations.

“If you look at the demographics nationally, we are on par with our aspirant and peer institutions when it comes to attracting students who are of African descent,” said Carol Henderson, vice provost for diversity.

UD officials point to the statistics for research-intensive universities that the school either competes with, like Rutgers, Penn State, the University of Maryland, or aspires to compete with, like Ohio State, University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin.

A group of 34 such universities had an average of 4 percent black students, according to a report run for UD officials by the National Center for Education Statistics.

UD agrees that it needs to do more.

In February, when Harker went to discuss the school’s state funding in front of the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, he addressed growing criticism about the lack of diversity from groups like the NAACP.

“In all candor, this has been a long-standing issue for the University of Delaware. It’s an issue that we need to continue to plug away at,” Harker said. “It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight.”

In 2012, after the Middle States report, the university launched the President’s Diversity Initiative, spurring the creation of new programs and student organizations designed to make the campus more inclusive.

In June of last year, Harker named Henderson, a UD professor who has authored books about the representation of black people in literature and culture, the school’s Vice Provost for Diversity.

“Diversity is an ongoing process and the university is actively involved in that process,” Henderson said.

Henderson’s job is to not just encourage diversity based on race, but also family income, sexual orientation and gender.

Harker directed Henderson to create a university-wide plan for diversity. She says a draft of that document should be ready by summer’s end.

Henderson points to a host of different programs UD already has created aimed at recruiting minorities and helping them succeed. A few of those programs include:

• The College Readiness Scholars Institute, in which Christina School District seniors and juniors get to visit the school and get help with admissions.

• UD Scholars, in which first generation freshmen come to school early to get acclimated to college life.

• Diversity Enrichment Leaders, specially trained guides who host campus tours for minority students and send personal letters to admitted students.

• Each One Reach One, which pairs first-year black students with upperclassmen.

• NUCLEUS, which includes additional work with academic advisers, weekly e-mails and social media posts about important academic deadlines and campus events, a dedicated study space, work-study positions and opportunities to do research as an undergrad.

School officials also point to a long list of student organizations dedicated to minority students, from the Asian Student Association to the Caribbean Student Alliance and the Indian Student Association.

UD has a Center for Black Culture, which lists at least 17 different student organizations for black students, including seven black sororities and fraternities, an NAACP chapter, gospel choir and African Dance troupe.

Henderson argues there’s evidence all these efforts are bearing fruit. Considering all minority races, the past two freshman classes have been some of the most diverse in school history, she said.

“Different affinity groups require different approaches,” Henderson said. “Here at UD we try to take lots of different approaches to diversity.”

Some, like professor Jones, see promise in the work that Henderson is doing and changes in the admission process.

“I don’t believe the efforts and the analytics have been there to support this effort until recently,” Jones said.

Black students were not permitted to attend UD until 1950, when Louis Redding successfully sued the school on behalf of six black students who were turned down for admission because of their race. Unable to attend UD himself, Redding went on to graduate from Brown University and earned a law degree at Harvard.

The year after the UD suit, cases Redding had filed in Delaware were combined with suits from other states in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court which found schools that were separated by race were inherently unequal. The decision led to desegregation of public schools.

Student activists like Anthony, who is president of the UD chapter of the NAACP, acknowledge that UD is taking some action.

“Dr. Henderson is fabulous,” Anthony said. “They’re trying. But more needs to be done.”

For one thing, Anthony argues the university needs to target more efforts at white students. Many white students and even white professors, she argues, are ill-equipped to have conversations about race.

“It’s a very polite campus,” Anthony said. “Talking about race can be difficult, and people don’t like to do it. But how can we address a problem if we can’t even talk about it?”

Henderson said the university has tried to spur campus-wide conversations about diversity through its First Year Experience program, in which freshmen students read a common book and have group discussions.

“The First Year Experience is one of the rare times that we get all our students together,” Henderson said. “We use that opportunity to have conversations about how we can be a more inclusive academic community.”

The university needs to hire more black professors, many students and faculty say.

Of the 1,203 full-time faculty at UD last year, only 52 professors were black – less than 5 percent.

“If I come visit campus and it looks like all the students are white and all the professors are white, that’s going to be a worry for me,” said UD grad Suddler.

He remembers black students at UD finding common places where they could gather to avoid a sense of isolation, like “The Booth” in the Trabant Student Center.

Suddler was a member of the first graduating class in the University’s Black American Studies program, double-majoring in history. He recently earned his PhD at Indiana University – another largely-white school – and will be a visiting fellow at Emory University in Atlanta.

“[Emory's] population is 10 percent black,” Suddler said. “That was appealing to me, to know that it was less likely where I’d run into the situation where my whole class is white students. To know that there’s a better chance there will be other black members of the faculty.”

UD professor Payne argues that the university can’t simply hire its way to a more diverse student body.

“It can be a hard problem for a university to solve because it is sort of an abstract issue,” Payne said. “There has to be a cultural shift that starts at the administration and goes all the way down to the faculty.”

Professor Ware says continued efforts from top officials won’t get traction unless the broader university community starts to see a shift in mindset.

“Decisions at the staff level, at the department level, have to be made with diversity in mind,” Ware said. “Professor Jones has to look out and see an all-white class of 35 students and think, ‘OK, this is strange.’ And that’s often not the case now.”

Contact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com, 324-2428 or on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.