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From: The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education <[log in to unmask]>
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Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 10:20:09 -0400
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THE JOURNAL OF BLACKS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Weekly Bulletin
October 23, 2003
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* QUOTE OF THE WEEK -- WAR OF THE IVIES: "My experience as Treasury
secretary and World Bank chief economist was just the most partial
preparation for attempting to negotiate with Skip Gates. . . . We like
you right here in Cambridge, Skip." -- Lawrence Summers, president of
Harvard University, stating his wish to a group of black alumni that
Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the African and African-American
studies department, will remain at the university. Gates is currently
on leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Rumors persist that he will eventually take a position at Princeton
University.
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* MIDDLEBURY'S EFFORTS TO BRING PROSPECTIVE BLACK STUDENTS TO CAMPUS
PAYS OFF IN INCREASED ENROLLMENTS: Middlebury College is located in
rural Vermont, not a climate attractive to many African Americans. Yet
it saw a sharp rise in black freshman students this year. Blacks are 5
percent of the freshman class this year compared to 2.5 percent a year
ago. Onis Cheathams, associate director of admissions at Middlebury,
told JBHE that the primary reason for the improvement is that the
college allocated funds to bring interested black students to campus.
Financial assistance for campus visits is based on need, but Cheathams
reports that the college picked up all expenses for a number of
prospective black students to come to Vermont. This commitment
demonstrates to prospective black students that the college is sincere
in its desire to increase racial diversity on campus.
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* RICE UNIVERSITY RECOMMITS TO RACE-SENSITIVE ADMISSIONS: The board of
trustees of Rice University has issued a "Resolution on Educational
Diversity" which authorizes the admissions office to once again use
race as a positive factor in the admissions process. Rice, under advice
of counsel, had abandoned its affirmative action admissions program
after the 1996 Hopwood federal appeals court decision which ruled that
the admissions procedures at the University of Texas School of Law
violated the U.S. Constitution.
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Hopwood in its Grutter
decision announced this past June, Rice will once again consider race
in its admissions decisions. Rice's decision to reestablish
race-sensitive admissions is good news for black students who are
considering applying to the university. Prior to the Hopwood decision
in 1995 blacks made up 10 percent of the entering class at Rice. This
year, when the university operated under a strict race-neutral
admissions policy, only 4.8 percent of the freshman class is black.
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* BLACK STUDENT DROPOUT RATES: THERNSTROMS FAIL TO TELL THE WHOLE
STORY: In their new book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in
Learning, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom leave the impression that the
main reason why only 40 percent of entering black students finish
college is poor preparation in high school. They write, "The
extraordinary high black dropout rate is no mystery. Students who leave
high school with skills at the eighth or ninth grade level can't keep
up in colleges that are not geared to teaching students what they have
learned in high school."
The fact of the matter is that 80 percent of all black students attend
state-operated colleges and universities. Most of these public
institutions do offer remedial classes that are geared to help black
and other students who have not been adequately prepared for college.
But of greater importance is the fact that the Thernstroms totally
ignore the most common reason why black kids drop out: money. On
average, black family incomes are only 60 percent of the incomes of
white families and black families have wealth that is only one tenth
that of white families. According to a study by Nellie Mae, the largest
nonprofit provider of federal and private education loan funds in this
country, 69 percent, or more than two thirds, of African Americans who
enrolled in college but did not finish said that they left college
because of high student loan debt.
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* HBCUs TOTALLY EXCLUDED FROM MAGAZINE'S LIST OF BEST VALUES IN PUBLIC
COLLEGES: The current issue of Kiplinger's contains the magazine's
annual listing of "The 100 Best Values in Public Colleges." The
rankings are based on data submitted by 500 public colleges and
universities nationwide. Academic criteria such as selectivity,
graduation rate, student-faculty ratios, library resources, and funds
spent per student make up two thirds of an institution's score. Cost
factors account for one third of an institution's ranking. "The formula
places greater weight on quality than cost," Kiplinger's says, "because
'value' is not synonymous with cheap."
Leading the list for the fourth consecutive year is the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Also among the top five best values
among public colleges are the University of Virginia, the College of
William and Mary, the University of Georgia, and the University of
Florida.
There is no historically black college or university on the
Kiplinger's list of best values in public higher education. It appears
that the reason for this is not one of cost because many public black
colleges and universities have tuition costs that are lower than
institutions that did make the cut. Apparently the reason the black
schools do not make the rankings is the magazine's heavy emphasis on
selectivity. None of the public HBCUs are highly selective in their
admissions policies and therefore were not even considered as a good
value by the editors of Kiplinger's.
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* THE CONTINUING ATTACK ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: John J. Moores, chair of
the board of regents of the University of California, has issued a
report that was highly critical of the admissions procedures used at
the University of California at Berkeley. The university is banned by
state law from using race as a positive factor in the admissions
process. Instead admissions officials at the university use what they
call "Comprehensive Review," which considers an applicant's
socioeconomic background and other obstacles the student has overcome
that may have impacted his or her academic standing.
The Moores analysis found that nearly 400 students who had combined
SAT scores below 1000 were admitted to the Berkeley campus in 2002. The
average for all admitted students that year was 1337. The Moores report
also showed that more than 3,200 students who had SAT scores above 1400
were rejected for admission. Moores concluded that the admissions
procedures at Berkeley "might not be compatible with the goal of
maintaining academic excellence."
Moores failed to point out that all students who are eligible for
admission to the University of California finish in the top 12.5
percent of students statewide while in high school. As a result, all
applicants are highly qualified. In fact, half of the nearly 400
students with SAT scores below 1000 who were admitted finished in the
top 4 percent of their high school classes.
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* STUDENTS AT BLACK COLLEGES ARE ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS IN A NEW WEB SITE
ALLOWING STUDENTS TO RATE COLLEGE PROFESSORS' PERFORMANCE: At
http://www.RateMyProfessors.com, students can log in and rate the
teaching performance of their professors in a particular course.
Students rate the professor on a scale from 1 to 5 on a number of
different categories. Students can also leave comments. The idea is to
give information to other students who are considering taking courses
from the particular professor.
When JBHE logged on to the site this week, we found more than 1
million ratings for 240,000 professors at 3,435 different colleges and
universities. Over 2,300 new ratings are added to the site daily.
Students at black colleges are active participants in submitting
ratings and comments at the site. There are ratings for hundreds of
professors at dozens of black colleges. For example, there are ratings
for 41 different professors at Xavier University in New Orleans. Four
of the 41 faculty members are given perfect ratings of 5. Two
professors received average ratings of 1.5. Michael Homan, a white man
who teaches theology at the university, was rated by 28 different
students and he received an average rating of 4.4. Comments ranged from
"Homan kicks butt" to "A great teacher who adds humor to our dull
academic lives."
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* DUKE DOES NOT PLAN TO COMPETE WITH THE CAROLINA COVENANT: In last
week's JBHE Bulletin we told you of the Carolina Covenant, a new plan
by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to do away with
loans for low-income students with the substitution of outright grants.
The new program will allow low-income students to graduate from Chapel
Hill without debt. Students who benefit from the Carolina Covenant will
be asked to work 10 to 12 hours a week at a campus job.
In response, nearby Duke University, a private institution, said it had
no plans to match the Carolina Covenant. Duke, which currently offers
financial aid to 275 low-income students, offers a package of grants
and student loans. "Overall, considering the cost of our tuition, it's
probably not possible to eliminate the loan component," reports William
Chafe, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Duke. "We're already
spending a significantly larger amount on financial aid than we were in
the past in terms of overall budget. To push it even further might well
create more problems."
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* BLACK FACULTY AT THE NATION'S HIGHEST-RANKED MBA PROGRAMS: A JBHE
survey of the nation's 25 leading business schools has identified 80
black professors who make up 2.7 percent of the total of 2,940 faculty
members at these schools. There are eight black faculty members at the
business school at the University of Texas and eight also at the
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the nation's
premier business school for students in the field of marketing. There
are seven black faculty members at Harvard Business School. There are
no black faculty members at the business schools at MIT or the
University of California at Berkeley.
Dartmouth has the highest percentage of black faculty among the
leading business schools at 6.7 percent. Fourteen of the 25
highest-ranked business schools have a black percentage of their total
faculty that stands at 3 percent or less. At eight leading business
schools, blacks make up less than 2 percent of the total faculty.
________________________________________________________________________
* STALKER OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN COLLEGE PRESIDENT NABBED BY POLICE: In a
bizarre incident, a white man was accused of hate crime violations for
stalking Shirley A. Jackson, the African-American physicist who is
president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The man claims that he
was targeted for murder by representatives of Federal Express, a
company where Jackson serves on the board of directors. The man was
arrested on the RPI campus after he was identified as the author of
several e-mails sent to members of the RPI community that contained
racist remarks about Jackson. When he was arrested, the man had in his
possession a flier that included a threat against the RPI president.
__________________________________________________________________
* COLONEL REB GETS A MAKEOVER BUT OLE MISS DECIDES TO DO WITHOUT A
MASCOT: Sixty-six years ago, in the 1937 yearbook, Colonel Rebel made
his first appearance as the official mascot of the University of
Mississippi. In his early days, Colonel Rebel was a uniformed
Confederate officer complete with saber and his white stallion
"Traveller," the name of Robert E. Lee's horse. Later, Colonel Rebel
morphed into a caricature of an old southern white gentleman with black
string tie, walking cane, large brimmed hat, and big, bushy white
moustache. Now the University of Mississippi has disposed of Colonel
Reb, at least in human form. No longer will a student, dressed up as
the colonel, patrol the sidelines at Ole Miss football games.
"The Confederacy is behind us," said Pete Boone, athletics director at
the University of Mississippi, when announcing the decision to drop
Colonel Reb. "I think it's time for us to change our whole thought
process, our whole image, our whole look and feel."
A New York-based design firm was hired to create a new mascot for the
university. The firm came up with two alternative mascots. The first
was called "Bruiser Rebel." This is a younger version of the old
Colonel with bulging muscles, a thick neck, and a bare midriff.
The second proposed mascot was called "Rowdy Rebel." This image
resembled a football-playing Mr. Clean. The university held an online
election to determine student, alumni, and Ole Miss fans' reactions to
the proposed mascots.
After two days, the athletic director ended the online election saying
there was no interest from fans in either alternative, although Bruiser
Rebel had outpolled Rowdy Rebel by more than five to one. Chancellor
Robert Khayat said that the matter was closed and that there simply
would no longer be a mascot that patrolled the sidelines of Ole Miss
football games.
__________________________________________________________________
* BLACK COLLEGE STARTS AFRICAN STUDIES PROGRAM: The University of
Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a historically black state-operated university,
announced that it will be launching a program in African studies and
African languages. The program was made possible by a two-year,
$150,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
__________________________________________________________________
* APPOINTMENT: Barbara Ross-Lee, dean of the New York College of
Osteopathic Medicine at the New York Institute of Technology, was named
chair of the board of directors of the Association of Academic Health
Centers.
__________________________________________________________________
* APPOINTMENT: Andrew Williams was appointed director of multicultural
affairs at Carleton College. He was a member of the department of
sociology and anthropology at DePauw University.
__________________________________________________________________
* APPOINTMENT: Linda Florence Callahan, an associate professor of
journalism and mass communication at North Carolina A&T State
University in Greensboro, was named chair of the minority and
communications division of the Association for Education in Journalism
and Mass Communication.
__________________________________________________________________
* AWARD: Luther D. Robinson, associate professor of psychiatry emeritus
at the Howard University School of Medicine, received the 2003
McDonald's Award for Black History Makers of Today in the field of
science.
__________________________________________________________________
* AWARD: Robert L. Harris Jr., vice provost for diversity and faculty
development and associate professor of African-American history at
Cornell University, received the 2003 Carter G. Woodson Scholars
Medallion from the Association for the Study of African-American Life
and History. The award is presented annually to a scholar with a
distinguished record of more than 10 years of research and scholarship
in the field of African-American history.
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STATISTIC OF THE WEEK:
· Percentage of the white adult population over the age of 30 who are
grandparents who live with their grandchildren: 2.5%
· Percentage of the African-American adult population over the age of
30 who are grandparents who live with their grandchildren: 8.2%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census
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* YOUR ADVERTISEMENT CAN GO HERE: Want to reach thousands of decision
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the print version of our journal. For more information, contact Elaine
Kursch at (212) 399-1084.
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© 2003 The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education All rights reserved.
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