Diversity efforts celebrated, questioned by minority alumni

BY RAY DELGADO

Hundreds of minority alumni returned to the Stanford campus last weekend and found a university that has made tremendous strides in admitting students of color while still struggling to diversify its ranks of faculty and top administrators.

Former presidents Donald Kennedy, left, and Gerhard Casper, right, joined current President John Hennessy to discuss the challenges and successes of diversifying the university community during their tenures. Photo: Matt Sayles

Nearly 750 minority alumni attended the university's first-ever conference on diversity efforts, titled "Community, Diversity and Excellence -- Celebrating Stanford's Minority Alumni." The conference was organized by the Board of Trustees Task Force on Minority Alumni Relations, formed in 2001 to "make all alumni of color within the Stanford community feel welcome at, valued by, proud of and included by Stanford, and to give everyone a stake in its ambitions and achievements."

Members of the university's El Mariachi Cardenal and El Ballet Folklórico joined Grammy-nominated Mariachi Sol de Mexico and Reyna de Los Angeles for a conference-related performance Sunday in Memorial Auditorium. The concert was a benefit for El Centro Chicano. Photo: David Gonzales

From panel discussions on mixed-race identity to a discussion with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, conference participants spent the better part of three days being entertained by various campus cultural groups and posing tough questions to various administration and Board of Trustees officials about the university's diversity efforts.

Alumnus Maurice Rabb earned his bachelor's degree in product design and computer science in 1990 and a master's degree in engineering and computer science in 1993 and said he enjoyed a mostly positive experience as a student and a conference attendee. But Rabb, who is black, said he was troubled by the university's slow gains in the number of minority faculty.

"I think Stanford has done better but there's great room for improvement," he said. "I was in design and engineering and our numbers [of minority students and faculty] were very low and limited headway has been made. I didn't feel as though there was much nurturing of us as graduate students, which I think is a very serious problem. I don't think I ever had a minority professor in my [degree-related courses]."

The subject of much discussion was the task force report on minority alumni relations, released Friday to coincide with the conference. The task force committee spent more than three years compiling data for the report, including comprehensive surveys of minority alumni perceptions, interviews with faculty and senior administrators, and close collaborations with the university's Diversity Action Council, a 63-member group of faculty, staff and students appointed by Provost John Etchemendy to look into diversity-related issues.

The report praised the university's current minority undergraduate enrollment of 48 percent, the best among its peer institutions, with second-place Harvard at roughly 32 percent. Stanford's number has risen from about 10 percent in 1973.

Minority graduate student enrollment has posed a greater challenge, with the current student population of 7,800 consisting of 12.1 percent Asian American students, 5.1 percent Hispanic, 2.8 percent African American, 0.6 percent American Indian, 33.6 percent international and 45.9 percent white.

The report also highlighted the gains that need to be made in faculty representation, with minorities making up less than 15 percent of tenure-line faculty, and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians making up less than 6 percent of that number. "These numbers are better than they were 20 years ago, but not by much," the report noted.

Although minorities comprise 24 percent of the current Board of Trustees membership, only three of the 34 highest-ranking campus administrators are minorities, approximately 9 percent. Only one member of a minority group has ever served as a school dean and only one has served as provost.

Surveys of more than 400 minority alumni showed very high levels of satisfaction with their undergraduate experience, pride in their degree and willingness to volunteer for the university. But only 49 percent of the minority alumni replying to the survey said the university does an excellent or good job of being responsive to alumni concerns, and only 65 percent said the university does a good job of making them feel welcome when they return to campus, compared with 80 percent of white respondents.

The report also showed that minority alumni give at slightly lower rates than nonminority alumni, as well as smaller dollar amounts, but that minority alumni typically graduate with greater debt.

The conference attendees were frequently reminded, both in the report and by university officials, about the importance of maintaining an active relationship with the university through volunteerism and donations as the university continues to diversify.

Saying it is critical for students of color to see themselves reflected in their teachers, many alumni at the conference urged administrators to do more to add minorities to the faculty ranks and administration.

Current and former presidents discuss diversity challenge

Former university presidents Donald Kennedy and Gerhard Casper joined current president John Hennessy for a candid Saturday morning discussion about the university's diversity-related struggles. Former President Richard Lyman had to cancel his appearance on the panel due to a recent accident.

Although minorities had broken a few barriers in the decades leading up to the 1960s, most of the progress occurred shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, when about 60 students seized a microphone from Lyman during a speech and read a list of demands, many concerning diversity. "The university agreed with most of the demands, and change began," Hennessy said.

In some ways, the controversy over Lyman's decision to get rid of the university's Indian mascot in 1972 led to an emerging consensus that diversifying the university was "the right thing to do," Kennedy said, making such efforts much less controversial during his tenure.

Highlighting the low rate of minority graduate students as one of the university's current challenges, Kennedy said that improvements in the ranks also would help the university bolster its faculty with people of color.

"How can we meet the goal of making faculty more diverse when we forgo it with low graduate school enrollment?" he said. "Why don't we do a better job of convincing our own undergraduates to go into Ph.D. programs and become faculty members?"

Casper spoke about the need to maintain diversity for the good of the university, but he also urged conference participants to include all alumni in those diversity efforts.

"I'm just ever so slightly worried about how much harder the task of maintaining the many excellences of Stanford, of keeping Stanford together, of moving it forward, becomes, if the alumni, in their relation with Stanford, were to self-divide," Casper said.

Some alumni talked about changing the conceptions of former alumni who don't see the value of the university's diversity efforts. A 1996 graduate who now lives in El Paso, Texas, told the crowd that she and her husband resurrected an alumni chapter in their town and had a hard time convincing older alumni to get involved.

"As we took on activating the club, we found it was very difficult to bring in the alums from the '50s, '60s and '70s who were mostly Anglo," she said. "A lot of the alumni were resentful because they feel that [the conference attendees] competed with their children."

Kennedy said that sentiment was one he encountered occasionally from older alumni who were happy about the university's increasing national and international profile but also concerned about how the university was changing.

"They're ambivalently delighted about what has happened to the university," Kennedy said. "They're worried about their kids getting in and that [the university is] changing in ways they don't understand. We've all done our best with this but nobody can make it go away."

Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, A.B. '74, A.M. '75, chair of the Task Force on Minority Alumni Relations, welcomed participants at the conference's opening session in Memorial Auditorium Friday. Ogletree said Stanford today is very different from the campus he knew as an undergraduate in 1971.

"It's hard to imagine [a university] that has accomplished as much as Stanford has accomplished during these past few decades," he said. "For the third consecutive year in a row, Stanford stands far above its peers in having more than 50 percent of its entering students representative of different ethnic groups around the country."

Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Robin Mamlet told attendees of an earlier conference panel session that the university recognized the importance of having a diverse student body.

"Stanford openly practices affirmative action and has done so for many years," she said, as the audience replied with enthusiastic applause. "Diversity is a plus factor."

Afterward, an alumna from the Class of 1977 with two children attending Stanford asked the panel about legacy admissions. The graduate said she hoped that, despite growing public criticism, Stanford would not abandon its practice of regarding legacy applicants in a favorable light "because it's our turn." In response, Mamlet said that legacy children of diversity alumni receive "very special notice."

Stanford Report writer Lisa Trei contributed to this story.