The question of racial diversity has riven higher education throughout The Chronicle’s history. While the share of full-time, first-year students who were not white rose to 42 percent in 2015 from just 10 percent in 1971, black students gained only a few percentage points, and their share of enrollment has been declining since 1985. Faculties have also failed to diversify significantly. Though the vocabulary of debates has changed — from “meritocracy versus egalitarianism” to “excellence and inclusion” — our coverage shows that campuses still struggle with a reluctance to talk about racist incidents, the pressure on minority faculty and students to “fit in,” and questions about what responsibility colleges have to foster broader social change.
October 20, 1969
Can the university make massive changes to help resolve its and the nation’s racial crisis? Or would such changes destroy the university?
More than 2,100 college and university administrators heard some stirring pleas and some measured responses as those questions were debated at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.
May 15, 1978
The Uneasy Undercurrent
In an informal survey of students and student-affairs administrators at some two dozen predominantly white institutions — public and private, large and small — across the country, The Chronicle found a considerable degree of alienation, avoidance, and distrust between the races. … Race relations are seldom discussed by today’s generation of students — except in the wake of an incident — and the subject is carefully avoided by many administrators who would like to believe that a lack of open conflict signifies improvement.
June 2, 1980
Hispanics on the Campuses: a Long Way to Go
“It wasn’t that white students were hostile,” says Sylvia Robledo, a senior at UCLA. “It was just that I was the only one. The only other Chicanas I saw were the maids cleaning the bathrooms.”
May 16, 1984
Promise of the Landmark ‘Brown’ Decision Is Unfulfilled After 30 Years, Scholars Say
The battle continues because there is still a debate about the definition of integration in higher education.
April 30, 1986
Black Students Who Attend White Colleges Face Contradictions in Their Campus Life
Even though predominantly white institutions often provide blacks with special cultural, academic, and social programs, the students still face situations — and subtle forms of discrimination — that leave them wondering whether they really belong.
April 26, 1989
Behind Ugly Racist Incidents, Student Isolation and Insensitivity
While the number of overtly racist white students who commit such acts may be small, those who have studied them say, the indifference of many other whites creates an atmosphere in which racist acts are tolerated.
March 16, 2001
In Brochures, What You See Isn’t Necessarily What You Get
Institutions regularly stage photos by gathering students from a rainbow of races and seating them around a cafeteria table.
July 4, 2003
Affirmative Action Survives, and So Does the Debate
The U.S. Supreme Court hardly ended the debate over race-conscious college admissions policies in its two landmark rulings last week involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But the court did answer the big question before it — whether the Constitution permits such policies — with a resounding yes. Its decisions may leave some colleges open to lawsuits challenging the nuts and bolts of particular admissions policies, but the general practice of using affirmative action to enroll a diverse student body appears likely to remain unassailable in the federal courts for many years to come.
January 26, 2015
What It Feels Like to Be a Black Professor
I want to think about my smiling as a sign of empathy and generosity, but maybe I am reading myself too kindly. At my most cynical and self-critical, I call it a postmodern version of “shucking and jiving": my trying to do whatever I can to put people at ease.
November 8, 2015
The Invisible Labor of Minority Professors
The hands-on attention that many minority professors willingly provide is an unheralded linchpin in institutional efforts to create an inclusive learning environment and to keep students enrolled.
January 3, 2016
Black Students Describe Racial Division, Isolation, and Prejudice at the U. of Missouri
What happened here this past fall — a homecoming protest, a televised hunger strike, a show of support by the football team, the resignations of the system president and campus chancellor — made Missouri a stage on which black students’ frustration, in all its dimensions, played out for a national audience.
July 14, 2016
Talking Over the Racial Divide
On seven Tuesdays this spring, The Chronicle watched as 14 students met in a course dedicated to discussing race, a perennial, at times explosive issue on campuses and across the country. The University of Maryland offers the course as part of an effort to make students more proficient with difference — to help them have thorny conversations on uncomfortable topics, see the value of other people’s experiences, and gain some perspective on their own. At least, that’s the hope.
