The higher education establishment has a mixed record on delivering the diversity it claims to prize, at best.
My friend Mike Adams lays out the latest failed attempts to achieve racial balance at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he has labored for more than a decade. Not so incidentally, the criminology professor has been denied a promotion at the state university where he toils for reasons that the powers that be there refuse to share.
Certainly he has not only published widely in his field but also displayed a mastery of it that the often-vacuous guests interviewed by Fox News host Greta Van Sustern can only envy. Can it be that the university seeks to punish him for the perceptive, often pungent, observations he offers on the state of higher education in the United States today in his townhall.com columns and in his various public appearances around the country?
“The administration at UNCW (The University of North Carolina – Whitey) has just found a new reason to spend more money on diversity,” Adams reports in his column. “Last year’s intensified efforts to raise black enrollment backfired and the black freshman population went down by 7.1 percent this year.”
“This news means, in all likelihood, that the university will be doubling its efforts to bring in more blacks next year,” Adams predicts. “If they do, this critic of the diversity movement predicts a 14.2 percent decrease in black enrollment in 2007.”
Contrast this record with that of the University of Mississippi. Never known as a den of diversity, Ole’ Miss was the site of pitched battles over segregation in the past. Its new president—Robert C. Khayat, the university has racked up some achievements that should give the schools more heavily government-subsidized peer universities pause.
“Under his watch, Ole Miss has undergone a facelift, with $300-million in new construction and restoration of its historic buildings, paid for in large part by alumni donations at a time when the share of the university’s budget made up of taxpayer dollars dropped from 54 percent to 21 percent,” Paul Fain writes of Khayat in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The changes have attracted more students: Enrollment has grown by 5,000.”
“The number of black students has more than doubled, to almost 2,000.”
It may not be the storied U. S. News & World Report ratings, but colleges and universities are falling all over themselves, no pun intended, to take credit for making the cut in The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students.
Most of the schools that made the top 20 in the roster of schools friendly to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender students are proclaiming their inclusion on the list in press releases on their web sites. For the record, here they are:
BEST OF THE BEST
Top 20 Campuses
American University
Duke University
Indiana University
Oberlin College
Ohio State University
New York University
Princeton University
Pennsylvania State University
Stanford University
Tufts University
University of California–Berkeley
University of California–Los Angeles
University of California–Santa Cruz
University of Massachusetts–Amherst
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota–Twin Cities
University of Oregon
University of Pennsylvania
University of Puget Sound
University of Southern California
The Guard Dawg, the conservative student newspaper at the University of Georgia needs its own watchdog. “On the evening of Thursday, September 21, vandals trashed 1,200 copies of the Guard Dawg,” Michelle Miller of the Leadership Institute reports. The estimated loss that resulted from the vandalism was $700, according to Miller.
The Leadership Institute is raising money to replace the destroyed newspapers.
The president of the Student Association at George Washington University fulfilled a campaign pledge that the man the college was named after would probably never have made. “Student Association President Lamar Thorpe announced Tuesday that free condoms will be available in freshman residence halls starting Thursday,” Andrew Ramonas reported in a story posted on September 28th in the GW Hatchet. “The initiative will put condoms in a bowl near security checkpoints at freshman residence halls.”
“The program will run this semester and could expand to include more halls in the future, said Thorpe, a senior.” In the current political climate, this lad might have a bright future.
The background: “During his campaign for SA president, Thorpe focused on improving sexual health on campus, making his ‘Condoms in the Residence Halls’ initiative one of the main pillars of his campaign,” Ramonas writes.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
