Category: Higher Education

New Position to Aid Student Retention
By Bart Shirley

Multicultural

Services is seeking to fill the position of assistant director, formerly known as coordinator of

student retention, who will be in charge of student success programs.

Student success

programs are efforts by the Multicultural Services office to aid all freshmen in their pursuit of

graduation, said Megan Palsa, assistant director of Multicultural Services. They offer a year-long

program that provides transitional help to new students.

“(The new administrator will)

look at all the data to see where we’re headed, ” Palsa said. Retention has long been a concern for

Texas A&M. Though 16 percent of the student body is composed of minority students, A&M still has

trouble shedding its homogenous image in the minds of prospective students, said Mark Weichold,

associate provost for undergraduate programs and academic services.
“Historically, from retention

and graduation rates, students of color are lower,” Palsa said.

Minority students are

statistically more at risk than white students of never crossing the stage at Reed Arena, Palsa said.

Sixty-five percent of minority students entering A&M eventually graduate, compared with 77 percent of

white students.
“Clearly, there’s no one answer,” Weichold said. “Some of the answers are not

just academic. It’s going to take the collaboration of many offices on

campus.”

Weichold said his office is working to get an indication of students who are

at risk for not returning for their sophomore year. His office is using several assessment tools, such

as the CSI and the NSE, to make that determination. Many programs exist to assist in retention

alongside the Multicultural Services office, he said.

“The Multicultural Services has

been a big part of our retention efforts,” Weichold said.
The discrepancy in student retention is

also one of the reasons for the hiring of the new vice president for diversity, Dr. James A. Anderson,

Palsa said.

“Dr. Anderson will work with Multicultural Services,” said Rodney

McClendon, chief of staff. “He will (also) be working with all colleges in regard to retention.”

via email from Asst. Prof. of English at Texas A&M, Elias Dominguez-

Barajas.

The recent Harvard study describing the resegration of U.S. schools has been

mentioned in several different contexts, and I’m sure that many … have not only heard of it but have

actually perused the full report. Despite the latter, I considered it pertinent to pass the information

along in case somebody who hasn’t heard of it wants the actual source for research purposes or

personal information.

[More summary below. Get the link at “Web Links” Module (the

menu at the upper left) under “National Resources.]

Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee began to

circulate their preliminary findings several years ago (starting circa 1997). Those findings have been

confirmed
in their final report, which includes the following points among

others:

There has been a substantial slippage toward segregation in most of the states

that were highly desegregated in 1991. The most integrated state
for African Americans in 2001 is

Kentucky. The most desegregated states for Latinos are in the Northwest.

However, in

some states with very low black
populations, school segregation is soaring as desegregation efforts

are abandoned.

American public schools are now only 60 percent white nationwide and

nearly one fourth of U.S. students are in states with a majority of nonwhite
students. However,

except in the South and Southwest, most white students have little contact with minority

students.

Asians, in contrast, are the most integrated and by far the most likely to

attend multiracial schools with a significant presence of three or more racial groups. Asian students

are in schools with the smallest
concentration of their own racial group.

The vast

majority of intensely segregated minority schools face conditions of concentrated poverty, which are

powerfully related to unequal educational
opportunity. Students in segregated minority schools face

conditions that students in segregated white schools seldom experience.

Latinos confront

very serious levels of segregation by race and poverty, and non-English speaking Latinos tend to be

segregated in schools with each other. The data show no substantial gains in segregated education for

Latinos even during the civil rights era. The increase in Latino segregation is particularly notable in

the West.

Here’s the direct quote from the Eagle’s Dec. 6 (2003) edition:

“There will be segregated money to use in scholarships to make one-on-one recruiting more plausible to

the success of the issue,” Mays said. “In addition, we’re going to give minorities access to other

scholarships.”

Note: Lowry Mays is Chairman of the Texas A&M University System Board of

Regents and Chairman and Chief Executive officer of Clear Channel Communications. Source:

theeagle.com
http://www.theeagle.com
/aandmnews/120603regentadmissionpolicy.htm

Texas A&M Regents Say Nothing in Writing
About Race or Affirmative

Action

Texas A&M Regents were widely reported as rejecting affirmative action in

admissions. However, an examination of the four sheets of paper considered by the Regents shows that

they said nothing in writing about affirmative action policy. By making no mention of affirmative

action, the Regents simply extended the Hopwood prohibition. But the Hopwood prohibition had once upon

a time interrupted their own ‘good faith’ policy of affirmative action.

If the Regents

adopted affirmative action as a sign of ‘good faith’ in 1980, and if it was revoked by outside forces

in the meanwhile, shouldn’t they resume the practice at their first opportunity, or offer a quite

serious explanation why not?

The Grutter decision of the Summer of 2003 had restored

affirmative action to the Regents, yet they met and voted unanimously to take no notice. This is not

‘good faith.’

By doing nothing to restore affirmative action in 2003, by simply

extending the Hopwood revocation, and by offering no written explanation, the Regents have effected a

kind of ‘pocket veto’ of the Supreme Court.

When a peculiar ‘civil rights’ path has

been chosen by administrative elites, deep in the heart of Texas, without any documentation whatsoever,

and having the effect of sustaining a dead law, one feels a shudder of recognition, that this is what

‘bad faith’ looks like up close.

Philosopher Lewis Gordon could not have been more

correct when he called racism ‘Bad Faith.’

By Greg Moses
Jan. 30, 2004

A Thursday guest column at a Conservative website, written by an anti-

affirmative-action activist, predicts that the Office for Civil Rights at the US Department of

Education will fight affirmative action in Texas colleges and universities.

The

report is remarkable for its well-embedded Republican-party sources. It was posted at USAGOP.Com and

written by a senior fellow from the Center for Equal Opportunity, Edward Blum.

The

report suggests a chilling answer to one of the mysteries in Texas higher education these days: Where

is the OCR and why are they saying nothing about Texas A&M’s announcement last month that it would

reject affirmative action in admissions at two of its predominately white campuses?

The

Blum column is shocking for its suggestion that OCR will speak out in opposition to affirmative action

plans at the University of Texas at Austin.

As Blum argues, “President Bush personally

–as governor and as president–and the rest of his administration have strongly supported the use of

race-neutral means to achieve diversity. Indeed, they have pointed to the system UT was using–and now

wants to reject–as a model approach.”

Blum’s report fails to mention that Bush made

written promises to OCR while he was Governor, that Texas higher education would augment where possible

its efforts to de-segregate predominantly white campuses, such as the University of Texas at Austin and

the Texas A&M University campuses at College Station and Galveston.

And Blum does not

address what OCR’s relationship might be to upholding the current context of constitutional

law.

When Bush was Governor, Texas was living under the influence of the Hopwood

decision, which was widely enforced as a prohibition against affirmative action in college admissions

for the state of Texas.

But Governor Bush was also party to an ongoing de-segregation

plan, and he made written promises, called the “Texas Commitment,” during the Summer of

2000.

Partly because of the Hopwood ruling, the implementation plan of the “Texas

Commitment” focused on rectifying long-standing neglect of historical black campuses in Texas, at

Prairie View and Texas Southern Universities.

Yet, the “Texas Commitment” by Gov. Bush

promised that Texas would operate within the complex context of constitutional case law and would

augment its efforts wherever possible to integrate predominantly white

campuses.

Meanwhile, the state’s top lawyer for Texas higher education has been

advising admissions officers about constitutional criteria for affirmative action that were created by

the Supreme Court in the Grutter ruling of Summer 2003.

Blum’s column raises questions

about the kind of civil rights logic that would be used to wield the power of OCR in opposition to

adoption of a constitutional affirmative-action program, especially in the context of a “Texas

Commitment” that was solicited by OCR in the first place.

But Blum’s column also

suggests that a larger political agenda might help explain Texas A&M’s announcement that it would not

take up the Grutter ruling as its guide.

I choose the term “announcement” rather than

“decision” because nothing about race or affirmative action was ratified in writing at the widely-

reported meeting of the Board of Regents last December. It came as a complete surprise to state

regulators, legislators, and civil rights organizations. And it is not yet clear how the policy was

percolated up through the decision-making structures at the College Station

campus.

Furthermore, Blum’s political analysis fails to note that the top ten percent

plan may have turned out to be even more contentious among Texas voters than affirmative

action.

In a recent comment to El Paso reporter Darren Meritz, Texas state Senator Jeff

Wentworth, a San Antonio REPUBLICAN, said, “There are a lot of problems with the Top 10 Percent rule,

and it needs to be repealed.” Sen. Wentworth, suggested that the restoration of affirmative action

would eliminate the need to impose the widely-studied race-neutral attempt to achieve racial diversity,

that was invented as an antidote to Hopwood.

Sen. Wentworth’s suggestion during an

election year may offer Democrats a chance to argue that affirmative action is actually less divisive

and more precise than the so-called race-neutral percentage plan.

Meanwhile today at the

University of Texas campus, a new report calls for some legislative relief from the percentage

plan.

And UT President Larry Faulkner surrounded himself today with diversity allies

from across the nation for a two-day diversity symposium. Please stay tuned to Texas, where the future

of civil rights is on the line.