After a decade of impressive growth, the programs and offices devoted to diversity in academe are bearing their share of pain from the recession.
In some cases the spending cuts are also leading to reductions in enrollment and positions for non-tenure-track faculty members, which may inadvertently hurt minority students and professors. And while most colleges have preserved or increased their financial-aid budgets this year, many were not able to match the growing need among their students. “Diversity in this case is not being spared,” says Moises F. Salinas, chief diversity officer at Central Connecticut State University, whose office is down to just two full-time employees after the associate director’s job was cut. “We have to learn to adapt to the new economic realities,” he says.
The biggest impact could come at state universities—including Arizona State University, the University of California, and the University of Washington—where reductions in state spending are forcing enrollment cuts or caps. The 450,000-student California State University system expects one of the most severe cuts—a loss of up to 35,000 students over the next two years, following a drop in state support of nearly $600-million. Minority students make up about 55 percent of the university’s enrollment, and Charles B. Reed, the system’s chancellor, fears that percentage could drop. Minority students tend to apply for admission and financial aid later than white students, and may find that campuses are already full, he says.
“We’re going to have to do everything we can to stay on top of that, including stepping up our outreach efforts,” he says. The system is expanding two programs designed in part to raise awareness of the university among minority high-school students. One provides algebra workshops to students in predominantly black churches, and the other works with Latina mothers to help them prepare their children for college.
Several of the universities in the State University of New York system that have competitive admissions are reporting increased enrollments this fall of middle-income and affluent white students who in better times might have enrolled at private colleges. Since socioeconomic status is closely associated with academic achievement, that trend threatens to squeeze out some lower-income and minority students, says Pedro Cabán, the system’s vice provost for diversity and educational equity. Final enrollment figures will not be available until next month.
Some private colleges have explored changes in admissions and financial-aid policies that might harm less-affluent applicants, and many others simply were not able to meet the growing financial need of applicants. Despite increasing its aid budget by 7.8 percent, Reed College rejected 100 applicants who had been slated for admission last spring but who required more financial aid than the college could provide.
In April, Thomas H. Parker, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College, publicly discussed actions his college might consider in a “worst-case scenario"—including no longer giving preference to first-generation and low-income applicants, a move that would save $3.4-million per year. A rebounding Amherst endowment has taken that possibility off the table, provided the stock market doesn’t fall sharply again.
“We in higher education need to be very careful about understanding the kind of endowment it takes to support policies like ‘no loans’ and need-blind admission,” Mr. Parker says. “It is a very costly endeavor.”
Experts say it may be a year or more until statistics are available to indicate how the recession has affected diversity on the faculty side. Some institutions are protecting efforts to bring in more minority professors. The SUNY system, for example, did not trim the $494,000 budget of its Faculty Diversity Program, which has helped its campuses attract nine new minority professors in the past two years, despite budget cuts among the system’s four-year institutions of 15 percent in 2008-9 and 9.5 percent in 2009-10.
Yet some fear that faculty diversity will suffer as campuses scale back jobs and hours for non-tenure-track faculty members.
“The general thought is that women and people of color tend to be among the last hired, and they tend to be disproportionately represented in the adjunct ranks,” says Shirley Robinson Pippins, senior vice president for programs and services at the American Council on Education.
For now, administrators appear more vulnerable than professors. The University of Colorado, which in recent years added a top diversity officer on each of its four campuses, last spring cut the job of chief diversity officer in its system office, saving about $140,000. Bruce D. Benson, the university’s president, now meets regularly with each campus-based diversity officer.
Actual and proposed cuts are sparking greater activism among minority students. In April students at the University of Florida marched through the campus chanting “No more budget cuts,” after the student-affairs office released a plan to meet state-mandated cutbacks by possibly eliminating a multicultural center. Patricia Telles-Irvin, the university’s vice president for student affairs, says she initially saw little choice but to cut the center, which provides services to minority and gay students, since most other services provided by her office are required by the state. She ended up consolidating two offices that provide mental-health counseling, and the multicultural center was spared.
The downturn has also galvanized those who feel that diversity spending is excessive. As Dartmouth College weighed budget cuts back in January, a poll by the Student Assembly revealed that students viewed the Office of Pluralism and Leadership as one of the college’s least-important programs. The assembly recommended scaling back the office unless it could reach out more effectively to the campus as a whole. (See an opinion article by the director of Dartmouth’s Center for Women and Gender, which is part of the pluralism and leadership office.)
Dartmouth officials say they took the student poll into account, but the pluralism office sustained only modest budget cuts, which did not affect salaries or positions. Sylvia Spears, who headed that office before recently being appointed acting dean of students, says it will do a better job of demonstrating how its leadership programs reach all students.
“In difficult times, people are looking across the institution at what is working and what is not working,” she says, “so it’s imperative that we are able to articulate coherently where we are having impact.”
Richard K. Vedder, an economist at Ohio University who also directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says it has become “faddish” for universities to boast about their commitment to minority students by pointing to the size of their diversity offices. “The question is, at a university with 20,000 students, can you do the job with three to five people, or do you really need 25 to 35?” he asks. Mr. Vedder sees most diversity jobs as a bull-market luxury—and believes they should be scaled back, along with intercollegiate athletics, to protect core teaching and research operations during hard times.
Damon A. Williams, vice provost for diversity and climate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says offices like his have grown for a reason: University presidents realize that changing demographics in the United States and the rise of the global economy mean that graduates need “cultural capabilities.” Mr. Williams is the first full-time person in his position, which was a part-time job before he arrived a little over a year ago. He directly oversees six employees. No one in his office has been laid off, although each staff member is taking 16 furlough days over the next two years—a requirement for all university employees.
“Diversity doesn’t have to be the first priority all the time,” Mr. Williams says, “but it has to be a priority enough of the time to make sure we keep the engine moving.”
Daryl G. Smith, a professor of education and psychology at Claremont Graduate University, agrees. “The next few years will show whether a university’s commitment to diversity is real or whether it’s something that is done just for the rhetoric,” she says.
Yet even some administrators who oversee diversity efforts say Mr. Vedder is right to draw a distinction between core functions and those that are expendable.
A decade ago, Joseph A. Tolliver, now vice president and dean of student life at St. Lawrence University, helped create the Consortium on High Achievement and Success, a network of 30 private liberal-arts colleges focused on promoting success among minority students. But last year, when Mr. Tolliver gathered with other leaders at St. Lawrence to identify budget cuts, he suggested dropping out of the consortium to save $10,000 per year.
St. Lawrence had also just started a Center for Diversity and Social Justice as the economy began to slide. The new director of the center quit when the expected budget for programs never materialized, Mr. Tolliver says. He says the center will be reconfigured this year, after the university completes a plan for recovering from the recession.
Mr. Tolliver concedes that diversity programs have borne a disproportionately large share of the cuts, but he says that simply reflects the university’s thinking: Faculty and financial aid get top priority, and everything else is potentially on the chopping block.
“I’m going to have colleagues who say, ‘He’s a traitor—he’s talking about cutting loose some valuable programs,’” Mr. Tolliver says. “I know I’m doing that. But if you don’t have the basic curriculum, and you don’t have the faculty and you’re not paying them, then all of the other programs in the world don’t matter one bit.”
