in black and white

The Boston University African-American Studies Department is located inside a small building on Mountfort Street. Easily mistaken for a residential home, it is separated from the rest of the campus by the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Founded in 1969, BU’s African-American Studies Program was the first in the country. The program flourished in its early years but later lost direction. It suffered diminished funding and passed through the hands of a series of interim directors.

Now under the direction of Ronald K. Richardson, the department is poised to become one of the leading programs in the country which in turn, he says, will help solve one of BU’s ongoing problems: How to attract more minority students to the University.

‘Having a vibrant African American Studies Program is a gauge of the University’s commitment to diversity,’ Richardson said, pointing out that recruiting minority students has to be ‘a university commitment.’

But for many black students already attending BU, ‘a university commitment’ to increasing diversity has not been visible. Currently, BU has the lowest black enrollment of any major university in the Boston area, according to numbers published by each of the area schools.

According to the Office of Enrollment Planning and Retention, BU has 404 degree and non-degree-seeking black students 2.26 percent of BU’s total enrollment. Tufts, Boston College and Northeastern have black populations that number 5.2, 4.8 and 6.2 percent of their student populations, respectively.

But while the numbers show BU may have a problem attracting black students, those who enroll tend to stick around, officials say. According to the Office of Enrollment Planning and Retention, the retention rate for black students who entered BU in the Fall 2001 semester is 92 percent, the highest retention rate of any other ethnic group at BU.

Gabrielle Saylor, president of the BU chapter of the NAACP, holds the admissions office responsible for such low enrollment numbers.

‘The admissions office is not effective in recruiting minorities, and the numbers are a pure reflection of this,’ she said.

Like most major universities, the admissions office attempts to recruit minority students through partnerships with third-party organizations, whose goal is to target qualified minority applicants and offer them assistance and encouragement to get them to enroll, according to Senior Assistant Director of Admissions Reginald Nichols, the person in charge of minority recruiting efforts. The admissions office also utilizes what they call, ‘direct outreach’ college fairs, visits to high schools and mailings to interested candidates, Nichols said.

But despite the similarity between BU’s recruiting tactics and those at other universities in the Boston area, Student Union Vice President of Multicultural Affairs Deborah Greene said she believes other schools have a more effective personal touch in their recruiting programs.

‘Other schools have different programs, different recruitment efforts; they cater to minority students I don’t see Boston University doing that,’ she said.

Representatives of the admissions office, however, say they feel they are doing a good job attracting minority students.

‘We, from an admissions standpoint, are doing all that we can,’ Nichols said. As for the ability of other local universities to attract more diverse populations, Nichols said he wished he knew ‘the answer’ to their success.

Reginald Pryor, director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at BU (the office that is charged with assisting minority students on campus), contends that BU ‘doesn’t take proactive, affirmative steps’ to increase diversity, leaving the task in the hands of students.

Until last year, BU didn’t have a minority acceptance weekend, something that according to Greene, area-colleges such as Tufts, Northeastern, Harvard, and MIT have been offering for years. It was not until last year, when students, including Greene, approached the Admissions Office and offered to organize and host a minority acceptance weekend that the program was put into effect.

According to Greene, 75 percent of students who attended the weekend decided to attend BU.

In the admissions office, students have taken the initiative to form an Admissions Student Diversity Board, which attempts to provide student input into the admission process. The Student Union is currently reviewing results of an on-campus diversity survey, combining it with information from other universities and proposing suggestions of how to improve campus diversity to the Board of Trustees. And Saylor, along with other black leaders on campus, have established a peer-mentoring program to make sure ‘no minority freshman will get left behind.’

While all these programs have seen positive feedback, Greene said students shouldn’t be the ones to shoulder the task of increasing diversity. She cites what she describes as the BU administration’s ‘apathy’ to be one of the roots of enrollment problems at BU.

Saylor agrees, reiterating Greene’s point that apathy is one of the major hurdles that needs to be overcome before BU can attract a diverse body of students. ‘I don’t think the administration is actually concerned,’ she said. ‘Until it’s a problem with the students, they won’t address it.’

While Pryor recognizes the need to recruit more black students, he argues that low enrollment of blacks is endemic to society. He said it is due to the fact that urban public schools are under-funded, understaffed and, therefore, aren’t preparing qualified applicants. ‘If [schools] haven’t prepared them in kindergarten through eighth grade, you have the reason why they aren’t prepared for Boston University,’ he said.

According to the African American Studies Center’s Richardson, the trouble Boston University has in attracting black students ultimately begs the question of whether the University should be using race as a factor in admissions, something it currently does not do. He thinks the university should. Citing a study conducted by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project, Richardson said, ‘Where minority student numbers have increased has been due to race sensitive financial aid improvements.’

The study examined the viability of ‘Percent Plans’ advocated by President Bush whereby the top percentage of high school students are guaranteed admission. Looking at specific cases in Florida, Texas and California, the study concluded that the extent to which these Percent Plans rely on standardized testing something minorities historically perform poorly on they do not effectively increase diversity. The study contends that affirmative action is the only effective way to increase diversity in student populations in higher education.

While the empirical research of the Civil Rights Project may support affirmative action as a means of increasing diversity, BU’s admissions office isn’t planning on implementing affirmative action programs.

‘We do not use race as a factor, period,’ Nichols said, explaining that the admissions office sees admitting students who may not meet BU’s academic standards in the interest of diversity as unfair to students and the BU community.