Roderick J. McDavis had no doubt that one of the first issues he needed to work on, if and when he got the top job at Ohio University, was the dearth of minority students. Faculty and staff members wouldn’t let him think otherwise. At an open forum during the search process, he heard one question after another about what he was going to do to increase diversity.
Ohio University was a very white institution — with just 640 African-Americans among more than 20,000 students in 2003, the year before he became its president — in a city that was less than 5 percent black. Over the next decade of Mr. McDavis’s leadership, as overall enrollment at Ohio University increased by 43 percent, the number of black students more than doubled.
Mr. McDavis is one of five African-American leaders of primarily white institutions who have seen the enrollment of black students rise by more than 100 percent during their tenures, according to a Chronicle analysis that compared diversity at 16 institutions led by black chief executives with that at about 200 comparable institutions (see table). He is also one of 10 such leaders who have seen enrollment of all underrepresented minorities rise by that much.
Among the university’s approaches during his tenure: doing more recruiting in diverse urban areas like Cleveland, establishing an Urban Scholars program, matching freshmen up with mentors who are upperclassmen, and offering supportive mixed learning communities of about 25 students to help new arrivals feel connected. “Every year we try to do a little better than the year before without putting a specific quota in place,” says Mr. McDavis, who plans to step down next year.
Leaders at many institutions list improving diversity as one of their institutional priorities; many struggle with that goal and acknowledge they are falling short, particularly in faculty hiring. But four of the presidents whose institutions were particularly successful in diversifying enrollment agree that, even in faculty hiring, the involvement of the president can be helpful. Chief executives “set the agenda,” says George A. Pruitt, president of Thomas Edison State University, in New Jersey. “They’re the ones that articulate the vision and values of their institution.” Those values filter down. “The president also has control of the reward system and the allocation of resources,” Mr. Pruitt says: If he or she makes diversity a priority, others on campus will see it as in their interest to do the same.
Since Mr. Pruitt became president, in 1982, black enrollment has increased more than eightfold at Thomas Edison, which offers distance education to adults.
At Middle Tennessee State University, President Sidney A. McPhee has seen black enrollment rise from 11 percent of the student body in 2000, the year before he took office, to more than 20 percent in 2014. The institution uses its diversity “as a marketing tool that differentiates us from other major universities,” he says.
Every year he joins a tour of administrators to major cities around the state. University officials have lunch with high-school counselors and hold large receptions at which they answer questions from prospective students and their parents. The True Blue Tour, as it is called, for Middle Tennessee’s Blue Raiders, has proved so popular that last year it expanded to cities in three neighboring states. The tour “gives a personal touch,” Mr. McPhee says, and he hears later from parents who “are shocked that a university president would be at this event.”
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“From the moment I arrived in East Lansing,” he wrote in his autobiography, Privilege and Prejudice, “it was clear my success would depend in very large part on how I dealt with the ‘race problem.’ " The varied constituencies, he says, were all watching for a misstep.
The latest African-American leaders say they feel conscious of the need to be inclusive of all groups that create a diverse campus.
Jackie Jenkins-Scott, who stepped down as president of Wheelock College in June after 12 years at the helm, made her commitment visible. “Diversity” is one of the eight links on the menu at the top of every page of the college’s website. The link leads to information about Wheelock’s Institutional Diversity and Inclusion Council. Ms. Jenkins-Scott was a co-chair of that panel, which regularly shared data on the college’s progress. The data were so detailed that no department could conclude that its goals had been met if, for instance, all the minority representation were in facilities services and not in student life or financial aid. The intention was not to point fingers, she says, but to inspire each department to improve. “What we tried to do was really celebrate some of the successes.”
By 2014, Wheelock, in Boston, had not only more than doubled African-American enrollment over a decade but had also built a faculty that was more than 15 percent African-American. Its managers, a group that includes top administrators like deans, were 19 percent African-American. Those last two percentages were among the highest of all institutions studied.
Of the African-American presidents he has spoken with, says Mr. Pruitt, of Thomas Edison, many were well supported in their efforts to diversify, while others reported resistance. “For most campuses, it’s embraced,” he says. “If the campus and the board brought in an African-American president in the first place,” that shows they value diversity, he says.
But that raises a chicken-or-egg question, he says. How much of the diversity is being achieved because of the work of the president, and how much because the institution is fully behind the goal, as exemplified by the hiring of the president?
Bringing in a student body that reflects the makeup of American society is only one step along the path to diversity, several of the presidents note. Over the past year, many primarily white campuses have faced protests by students demanding greater diversity and the eradication of racism and its symbols. “When an institution has a commitment to do this work,” says Ms. Jenkins-Scott, “you have to be prepared to live with both the challenges that it brings and the rewards.”
At Middle Tennessee, as Mr. McPhee walks around the campus he has led for 15 years, he still gets stopped sometimes by people who, mistaking him for a service worker, ask him to attend to an overflowing trash bin or other maintenance duty. A few times a year he gets openly racist messages about his role.
“I don’t take that on and waste one moment of my time worrying about their perception,” he says. He feels confident that the broader community is behind him, or he wouldn’t have kept his job for so long.
Likewise, he would never deny that minority students have experienced some racism on campus, but “to give the impression that it’s pervasive is absolutely from my perspective not accurate.”
During a recent effort to remove the name of a Confederate general from a campus ROTC building, one protester suggested that his fellow black students should leave Middle Tennessee and attend historically black colleges and universities instead. Mr. McPhee hasn’t seen any signs of such an exodus. The student who made the proposal earned his master’s degree in history from Middle Tennessee in May.
But challenges remain. When Mr. McPhee was on the faculty of Oklahoma State University decades ago, he remembers, he was “one of those rabble-rousers” urging the university to do a better job of recruiting faculty members from minority groups. “Now I look in the mirror and say, ‘You’re the guy.’ "
Ruth Hammond is editor of the People section and the Almanac; follow her on Twitter @RuthEHammond; or email her at ruth.hammond@chronicle.com
