EDITORIAL: BU’s diversity could use a boost

The report card on diversity representation in Boston-area schools is in, and Boston University is pretty much failing.

While the number of international students at all of the major Boston-area colleges — BU, Northeastern University, Boston College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Suffolk University and University of Massachusetts Boston — is climbing, the statistics on black student enrollment is bleak. At BU, MIT, Northeastern and Tufts, just 3 percent of all students are black.

Federal data points to slightly less horrifying numbers at Harvard, BC, UMass Boston and Suffolk, but with the nationwide statistics hovering around 15 percent, Boston-area colleges have a long way to go before diversity is established.

This report comes after two high-profile incidents have come out of BU just within the academic year. The school’s African Presidential Center, run by Rev. Charles Stith is set to close due to lack of funding. Stith postulated that it is because the school lacks commitment to promoting diversity for black people. The school argues that Stith hasn’t raised enough money to keep the center running, and as an independently funded center that opened in 2001, it was not BU’s responsibility to pay for its operation.

Northeastern’s African-American cultural center, on the other hand, provides more of a safe haven for black students. While Northeastern’s numbers of black enrollment are just as dismal as BU’s, The Boston Globe interviewed students who said the center provides them with a home on a campus where they don’t always feel they belong.

“It was hard at first to have this campus be my second home,” said Northeastern first-year student Henoss Taddesse to the Globe. The center acts as a place to discuss issues pertinent to their race, and students said it has prompted more dialogue and activism all throughout campus.

BU’s commitment to diversity — or lack thereof — was also brought into the spotlight earlier in the academic year. In November 2014, BU President Robert Brown was asked by Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson to appear in front of City Council to discuss diversity at BU. After Brown refused to appear the first time, he was subpoenaed to appear or risk facing arrest. Jackson told The Daily Free Press he was invested in Brown’s appearance because of the size and prominence of BU in Boston, and said the institution needs to be doing more to increase opportunities for diversity.

In the meeting, when asked about what he feels BU’s obligation to Boston is, Brown replied with a rather vague response that the responsibility is “helping the city become a great city where everyone works and goes to school and as an economic engine,” the FreeP reported on December 20, 2014.

Jean Morrison, BU’s provost and chief academic officer, told the Globe that important progress is being made in terms of more black students being admitted and enrolled — 4.6 percent of the Class of 2019 is black, according to statistics provided by BU, the Globe reported.

Morrison said the challenge lies not in a refusal to accept black students, but more that there is a lack of academically qualified black students, and all top universities compete for them.

“It is a pipeline problem,” Morrison told the Globe.

Echoing Morrison’s statements, Shaun Harper, a University of Pennsylvania professor studying diversity in higher education, told the Globe that the problem is more one of poor recruitment of students in underprivileged areas and a lack of encouragement from high school counselors.

To combat this, Suffolk has recruited students in Boston public schools and has created programs to help minority students succeed once they get to college. They are often first-generation college students, as well as a minority on campus, making for an alienating atmosphere.

It’s likely a bit of a culture shock when a student comes from a place where people like them were the majority, and suddenly they are the minority. But it stems more from society disenfranchising them than schools just plain not accepting them. There is a problem with the system that feeds these students into universities, or doesn’t feed them into universities at all, rather.

Diversity is an important factor to look at when creating a class of students. There needs to be a certain portion of students who are from minority backgrounds so that they can give back to their communities at home and to the community at predominantly white schools like BU. Part of the college experience is experiencing things different from what you would get at home.

But home is sometimes where the problem lies. At private schools and public schools in wealthier areas, there is a culture of counselors being there for you and resources being offered to you. It’s not necessarily like that at every school. In some areas across the country, you’re more encouraged to make ends meet than you are to go to a top university, and understandably so.

There are differences in what’s expected of you based on your background. If you’re not expected to go to a good four-year university, you’re not going to have that drive. It’s an important thing to instill into the minds of young people in impoverished and minority communities, and it has to start further down the line if we ever want to make a real change. These gaps need to be closed somehow, and BU needs to be doing more to close them.

It’s also a matter of what the administration is going to do to make students feel like they belong at this school. When the percentage of faculty who represent minorities is also low, it’s difficult for a minority student to feel like they belong. It’s easy to feel alienated when there are so few people on campus who look like you.

Having Morrison, BU spokesman Colin Riley or any other BU official talk about diversity is all well and good, but having Riley or Morrison say these things is just not as effective as having Brown himself say these things. BU needs to make a change with how it is representing itself. Having Brown show up to the City Hall hearing on diversity says so much, but having him step into the public eye and promote diversity without a subpoena would say a lot more.

More needs to be done to ensure that there is diversity in the student body and faculty of the nation’s top universities — to ensure that BU doesn’t fail its next test and to better the lives of minorities in this supposed country of opportunity.