Student Union officials delivered a minority recruitment report yesterday to Provost Dennis Berkey and Dean of Students W. Norman Johnson, who will review it and discuss it with other administrators in the coming weeks and months, Berkey said.
Berkey and Johnson met with Union vice president of Multicultural Affairs Deborah Greene, who presented the long-awaited minority retention report she and numerous other minority students have been working on since January.
After the meeting yesterday, Berkey said in an e-mail that he and other administrators will look it over but did not give any indication as to when they would respond.
“The report will take time to digest,” Berkey said. “My colleagues and I look forward to reading it and to considering how to benefit from it.”
The proposal was also submitted to the Board of Trustees last week, but Union officials said they are unsure about whether the Board received it. Greene said she is expecting a letter of response from board leaders.
“We submitted it to them, and we know that they are on their way,” she said.
The proposal outlines Boston University minority students’ views on issues of black and Latino recruitment and retention at Boston University.
The proposal asks administrators to work toward enrolling more black and Latino students while educating the community about the effects of race on society. Currently, 69 percent of BU students are white while only 2.5 percent are African-American, according to the report.
The proposal calls for a Minority Recruitment Council comprised of faculty, students and alumni to work in conjunction with the Office of Admissions in creating and maintaining ambassador programs, Minority Accepted Students Weekends, a Afro-American/Latino Cultural Center, a mentoring program and black and Latino studies programs.
The report calls on the university to put more effort into their minority programs to help keep minority students at BU.
“The Black and Latino students are tired of hearing that Black and Latino scholars do not choose BU,” the report reads. “It is not that other institutions are better than Boston University; it is just that competing universities put more effort into recruiting and retaining these students.”
Union officials spent early February compiling surveys on the topic, but did not use the statistical information from them because Greene said organizers of the effort wanted it to “be a statement of their feelings.”
Greene said she is optimistic about the prospect of a positive response from administrators.
Those who participated in the effort expect that concrete responses to the proposal will take time because the issues raised cannot be solved overnight, Greene said. Administrators will not solve the problem with “one letter, at one time or during one event,” she said.
“There are different things in different areas of the community that must be done and we expect it to take a while,” Greene said.
“I feel that the administrators understand our concern and take this issue very seriously,” Greene said. “This ‘call to action’ will open the lines of communication between students and administrators so that we can work together to come up with a committed and strategic plan to improve black and Latino enrollment and retainment.”
Greene said participants in the effort will now mostly wait for administrators to respond to the report but will also work to spread word about the document among minority students. The group is hoping administrators will research BU minority issues and brainstorm possible solutions in the near future, she said.
The original deadline for the proposal was Feb. 10, but Greene said Union officials pushed the deadline back to get more student input. She also said she was unable to work on the project for a period of time early in the effort.
“I also had personal issues that kept me from being able to put out the report by the original proposed date,” said Greene.