Summer/Fall 2002

Moving Forward on Diversity

YOU HAVE A RIGHT to ask what our strategy is and how we are going to pursue it. I’ll give you an overview here.
We are committed to continued, serious support of faculty and staff efforts to educate students for responsible global citizenship. Where we have the most control over our situation is in what and how we teach, both in and out of the classroom, and here we are a leader. Diversity education is not about the inculcation of ideology. It is about the hard task of bringing multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives to bear in order to help students both understand how different the world looks depending on where you stand – how economics, politics and culture operate to distribute power unequally – and how class, race, gender and other social differentiations privilege some while disadvantaging others. These matters will continue to have a very high priority at St. Lawrence.
Even though it will remain a challenge, we must continue in our efforts to make St. Lawrence better reflect the diversity of the world we are preparing students to enter upon graduation. We have been doing so, and we will do more. I stress first that our curriculum matters enormously in the attractiveness of St. Lawrence to talented faculty and students, and in this area the St. Lawrence faculty, administration and trustees for many years, and funded by a sequence of foundation grants over more than a decade, has stepped out ahead. Here are some data from a recent survey in which our faculty participated, comparing them to the faculties of other nonsectarian four-year private colleges:
In addition, 33% of St. Lawrence faculty members use a language other than English in their research, and 40% define their teaching or research as “international studies.” Further, 40% of St. Lawrence students study abroad in one of our dozen-plus programs, or occasionally on a program sponsored by another university.
Diversity within the faculty is educationally vital and a key measure of institutional excellence. We have had for 12 years now a Jeffrey Campbell Fellows Program. Named after a St. Lawrence African-American alumnus of the Class of ’33, this program brings three to five advanced graduate students of color to campus each year who teach one course a semester, work on their dissertations, and share their research with the campus community in public presentations. The program has three goals: ensure that advanced graduate students of color have both the time and the resources to complete their dissertations and are prepared to be competitive in the job market as they complete their doctorates; and, most important, give us and them the opportunity to get to know each other so that, if a good match exists between them and St. Lawrence, they might become full-time, tenure-track members of the faculty.
We have accomplished the first two goals very well, but the third less well. In my time at St. Lawrence just two Jeffrey Campbell Fellows have become full-time members of our faculty, though we have offered the opportunity to others. Grand Cornwell, our new vice president of the University and dean of academic affairs, has made it a high priority to examine this program carefully to see how we can do better. In addition, we will re-examine our approach to seeking diversity in all regular faculty and staff searches to see what we can do to produce results with more frequency.
There is increasing evidence that the best students, the students we seek to attract to St. Lawrence, want to go to colleges that reflect society’s diversity. Here again we are making progress in some ways and not in others. We are pleased that we continue to be as attractive to males as females (many of our competitors have seen the percentage of men in their student bodies decline in some cases to almost 40%), that about 17% of our students come from the North Country, and that each year, our students hail from roughly 40 states and 20 nations. Some people think that St. Lawrence students are disproportionately from wealthy families, but this is not so. The average family income of our students is below that for the national liberal arts colleges with which we compete for students, and over 75% of our students receive need-based grant aid from the University.
But we lag our competitors with regard to numbers of American students of color. Our strategy involves identifying American prospective students of color earlier and communicating with them more often, and we have established a special merit scholarship, the Presidential Diversity Scholarship, which has allowed us to attract some wonderful students we would otherwise not be likely to enroll. We believe these extra efforts will bear fruit, and we continue to recruit and provide need-based aid to limited, but critically important, number of outstanding international students.
A crucial additional factor in attracting diverse students is the quality and reputation of the University itself. As we begin to move up – and we are moving up – we will increasingly be a university that top students of color want to attend. The reality of our world is that these students have, and deserve, more options. The better we perform, and the more we are recognized for it, the easier it will be to succeed at the numbers part of the diversity equation.
Why does this topic continue to command our attention? It is easy to become preoccupied simply with the numbers. The positive impacts of diversity on student learning, after all, both in and out of the classroom, are hard to obtain if diversity is limited in a particular educational institution. But as Trustee Derrick Pitts ’78 has reminded us often, the fact that it is hard to achieve diversity – especially racial and ethnic diversity – in a university located in the North Country can too easily be used as a crutch, as an excuse, for not seeking to achieve the “difference that difference makes,” the point summarized beautifully in Tom Coburn’s essay on page 26.
There are two important reasons for a university to focus on diversity and inclusiveness. The first is social justices. In America, members of certain groups continue to experience discrimination based on group membership and hence have been underrepresented in higher education. Because access to higher education is so critical to one’s life chances in America, and because universities are charitable institutions in the service of the public good, we must be leaders in the effort to get American outcomes to match the eloquent and deeply meaningful aspirations embedded in the American creed.
We should never lose sight of this issue of justice, but a second reason for a strong commitment to diversity and inclusiveness is equally powerful. “Put bluntly,” Tom Coburn says, “intentionally engaging differences of all sorts educates, as virtually nothing else does.” I aggree. And a growing body of research, was well as common sense, documents the educational value of diversity in an inclusive educational community.
Diversity and inclusiveness is a very serious business with us, as I know it is with many, many alumni who push us to move farther and faster. There are many priorities needing attention at St. Lawrence. This is one of the highest.