TRUSTEE´S ORDER: INCREASE DIVERSITY
The Board of Trustees has directed President Thomas P. Salmon and its new chair, Edward Zuccaro, to develop a strategic plan for increasing diversity at UVM.
In a resolution adopted on Saturday, February 4, the board ordered the two officials to set goals and timetables for attracting students, faculty, staff and administrators who will make the campus more diverse --- and for ensuring they will stay.
The resolution directs Salmon to make an initial progrerss report to the board in May and a more comprehensive one in May 1996.
Salmon reminded the trustees that there are no easy answers to the complex problem of increasing diversity, but he asserted the administration´s commitment to be more creative and energetic in order to find solutions.
"The future is now -- let's get cracking," Salmon said.
Much of the trustees´ discussion on Feb. 4 -- and at a meeting of the Committee of the Whole on Friday, Feb. 3 -- centered on cultural diversity. The discussion followed a report by the Commission on Racial Equality and Multicultural Education, which promotes and monitors campus efforts to increase diversity.
Commission chair Kathleen Manning said her group was particularly concerned about a drop in the percentage of African-, Latino-, Asian-, and Native-American (ALANA) undergraduate students enrolled at UVM: from 4.6 percent in fall 1988, the year or the first Waterman occupation, to 4.4 percent last fall.
The university, Manning said, needs to take a "proactive" stance and look at ways "beyond equal opportunity and beyond affirmative action," to attract ALANA students, faculty and staff.
"Every hiring opportunity needs to be looked at as an opportnity for people of color to apply," she said. "If that´s not what´s happening, why not?"
Some commission members, Manning said, are frustrated at what they perceive as inaction on the issue. "These issues have been talked about for a long time," she said. "I have a binder of (resolutions) in my office. In there are all the (resolutions) passed by the Board of Trustees. It goes back 20 years....When this commission started and people were appointed, many people said, "This can´t be like other (initiatives) or I won´t participate," she said. "How do any of us get this institution moving fast enough? There is a lot of frustration about engendering the will to change."
Daren Mooko, a graduate student and commission member, said that many ALANA students think the administration fails to solicit their opinions no what can be done to increase diversity. "The ALANA students on the commission feel that way, too -- that this commission can move only as fast as the administration wants it to," Mooko said.
In a vigorous exchange, trustees continually pledged the board's support for a more diverse campus. "Everybody has to know that the board is tired of this and that we´re going to take action to support the activities of the commission," Trustee Frank Bolden said. "It´s easy to see we´re not going in the right direction," when, as Associate Professor of Education Dolores Sandoval pointed out, the number of tenured African-American faculty members has shrunk to a handful. (The percentage of ALANA faculty -- if non-tenured faculty are included -- has risen.)
"This has ties to ALANA student recruitment," Sandoval said. "Without ALANA faculty, it's hard to recruit ALANA students." Euro-American students are also not getting the education they need by attending a culturally homogenous university, she stressed. "Over many years we´ve seen this as a problem for our students of color," she said, but it´s also a problem for white students who will enter a diverse world after graduation.
Trustee Dick Dennis said that UVM needed to make one person accountable for seeing that minority representation on campus increases.
Salmon told the board in its Feb. 4 meeting to look no further than his office. "I volunteer," the president said. "I am the person ultimately responsible. Let´s not fret over that issue."
[UVM Overview] [1777-1933] [1984-1989] [1990-1994] [1995-1996] [1997-present] Racism Home Page