University Times

Quality and diversity

Having spent more than 26 years of my professional life attempting to contribute to our University becoming equally accessible to all, and given the current undertones of the national and local dialogues regarding what is labeled diversity, I decided to share the following personal views as we seek to reposition our University. Because the African American community's needs are so varied, complex, pervasive, and anchored by long historical roots, African American access to higher education and the highest levels of quality are necessarily linked. Mediocrity and average cannot have even temporary residence in African American access to higher education because the very nature of the issues demands the very highest levels of intellectual attainment. To the extent that access includes scholars of all colors applying their expertise to problems of great concern to the African American community and the larger society, there is no room for mediocrity. We need the very best scholars and students to address matters such as structural poverty, disproportionate killer disease rates, disenfranchisement from the benefits of new information technology, under-representation in quantitatively based disciplines, absence from big business, and inadequate research on the African Diaspora. Effective African American access to higher education makes no allowances for academic ghettos or peripheral student activities as a function of color. Rather, African Americans must be involved intricately in the central and highest quality academic activities of our University. As has been the case in numerous instances at our University, effective African American student access includes students achieving at the highest levels of attainment. Through our Honors College, African American students have won several prestigious awards, including a Rhodes Scholarship, Woodrow Wilson Scholarship, National Fellow in the Humanities award, and several National Science Foundation Fellowships. Our world class Department of Philosophy has enrolled several African American graduate students. One of my former African American students, Albert Wynn, sits in Congress; another, E. Bebe Moore Campbell, is one of the nation's foremost authors, and yet another, Marta Effinger (with Dr. Vernell Lillie's mentoring) won the distinguished Lorraine Hansberry playwriting contest before matriculating at Harvard for graduate studies. Several of my former African American students now work at the University of Pittsburgh — one is an administrator in our prestigious School of Law, one works in our critically important General Counsel office, and several are in leadership positions in our highly effective Admissions and Financial Aid office. Another one of my former African American students serves as provost at Millersville University. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to emphasize admissions standards without placing a commensurate emphasis on student achievements at graduation. This limited view leads some to believe mistakenly that equal opportunity programs entail a lessening of quality, and providing access for African American students in particular is believed to be a matter of lowering standards. On the contrary, we must remember that our University Challenge for Excellence Programs (UCEP) have contributed to hundreds of African American students becoming physicians, lawyers, social workers, dentists, business people, Africana Studies scholars, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, information scientists, public school teachers, university professors, and a host of other successful professionals. Without UCEP, tremendous talent would have been wasted, and our society would have experienced a significant loss. The same can be said for another of our access programs, the Engineering Impact Program, which has produced hundreds of very successful African American engineers, many of whom now occupy senior managerial positions in industry and government. Through our physics depart-ment's summer undergraduate research program, we have one African American student enrolled in our School of Engineering, two have received graduate degrees in physics, another will pursue graduate work in computer science at Berkeley, and another is planning for a career in biophysics.

Notwithstanding many examples of African American student, faculty, staff and administrative presence advancing our University's claim to the highest levels of quality, there are areas of the University where such a presence is lacking. Only one of the Board of Trustees' 13 committees is chaired by an African American, and he chairs the affirmative action committee. All of the regional campus presidents are white, all but one of the University's officers are white, all but one of the deans are white. Only one of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' 31 department chairpersons is an African American, there is no African American director of a major research center at the responsibility unit level, and, in all of the foregoing categories, most of the administrators are white males. There are no tenured or tenure stream African American faculty members in public health, health and rehabilitative sciences, dental medicine, library and information science, nursing, at the Titusville campus, and in 23 of 31 arts and sciences departments. Regarding African American staff, the greatest representation is found in the service/maintenance sector, and the least representation is found in the skilled crafts. Provost James V. Maher and Interim Chancellor Mark Nordenberg view the Board of Trustees' challenge to improve student quality as a challenge to do so while continuing to advance our University's diversity agenda. And a sizable segment of our University community stands ready to do the same. Neither our University nor any public university can make a legitimate claim to excellence while consciously or unconsciously serving only some of its constituents. As Harvard University's president indicated in the March/April 1996 Harvard Magazine, this latter view finds support dating back to notables such as John Stuart Mill, who emphasized bringing human beings into contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. As we reposition our University, we should focus on positive diversity outcomes, not on paranoid possibilities. We should study carefully and build on our demonstrated successes in areas such as law, social work, arts and sciences, library and information science, education, engineering, public health, nursing, business, and the Honors College. We must look to our provost, deans, chairpersons and senior faculty members to increase the African American faculty presence.

To the senior leadership in our University's business sector, we turn for leadership in enhancing the African American presence in executive/administrative/managerial positions, and for greater participation in our University's purchasing and business contract activities.

To our provost, chancellor and Board of Trustees, we look for leadership to alter the composition of our top administrators. We must evaluate our diversity programs and respond appropriately, just as we are doing for other activities critical to the success of our University.

Finally, we should pursue this diversity agenda not only because of the historical and current institutionalized obstacles to African Americans' full participation in society and our University, but also because accessing higher education makes for better social policy than consignment to prisons, and empowering is more effective than structuring dependency. If provided access, African Americans will join those who advance the intellectual frontiers of areas such as computer engineering and wireless communication, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, game and decision theory, conflict resolution particularly related to ethnicity and nationalism, transnational crime, critical studies, structural poverty, developmentally appropriate child care practices, languages for the Internet, techniques for the effective use of supercomputers, Afrocentric communication studies, financial restructuring, corporate governance, law and high technology, law and social policy, and regulation of gene expression. I am convinced that, at the turn of the century, the University of Pittsburgh will be an institution of the highest quality, in part, because African Americans will be critical to achieving the central goals of our University.

Jack L. Daniel is vice provost for Academic Affairs and chairperson of Equipoise, an organization of African-American faculty, staff and administrators at Pitt.