Diversity

A “core value” for Lafayette’s new president

by Rob Stewert |  illustration by Terry Stout

Black’s Law Dictionary lists “ethnic, socio-economic, and gender” as types of diversity. But that’s not broad enough for Lafayette. Diversity is high on the agenda of Dan Weiss. The new president spoke to the topic at length in his inaugural address. As dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins, he led initiatives that resulted in new courses and a significant increase in students and faculty of color.

“I take a very broad view of diversity. It’s important to think of it as a core value rather than an initiative or an action plan,” he says. “I think of diversity as social and intellectual pluralism, where we create an environment at Lafayette that is what I would call nourishing of the diversity of this country and stimulating to the intellectual climate we are trying to create here.”

“Intellectual and social diversity means having a whole host of people with different kinds of intellectual interests, personal backgrounds, ethnic origins, and experience bases, so as to have real learning here that is rich and fundamentally diverse,” Weiss continues. “It means having people interested in poetry and engineering; it means having people who grew up in the inner cities with one parent.”

An important component of a diverse campus is a diverse student body. “The College is making real progress on that front,” says Carol Rowlands, director of admissions. U.S. minority students have made up an average of 12 percent of each of the last four entering classes. The average percentage during the dozen years before that was just over 8 percent. Fourteen percent of the first-year students who enrolled this fall are American students of color. Add foreign students of color and the average percentage of students of color in the last four entering classes is close to 16 percent. In the class of 2009 it’s 18 percent. Indeed all international students add to the diversity on campus, says Barry McCarty, dean of enrollment services: “Our students from Bulgaria, for example, are not students of color, but they bring a very different perspective.”

The question of why a diverse student body is important brings a united, though individualized, response.

“Diversity makes for a better learning environment on several levels,” Weiss says. “One, it is a fact of life that familiarity with other kinds of people makes you more successful in the world. Life is a diverse experience — whether your college experience is or not — full of people of all backgrounds, races, creeds, intellectual orientations, and social backgrounds. So if we can make this a laboratory that is more consistent with what the world looks like, people will develop strategies for how to interact with others.”

“And the intellectual exchange that takes place on a campus depends more than anything else on the people who are participating in that exchange. You are going to have a more interesting conversation about social issues or historical questions or even scientific questions if you have sitting around the table people who have very different views of the world, different experiences,” says Weiss. There are social benefits, as well, for students—and others—who cultivate “riskier, but in many ways more rewarding, relationships with people who don’t act exactly like yourself,” he adds.

The College’s first-year orientation program this year, which examines September 11th and its aftermath, is geared toward establishing a broad definition of diversity, notes Provost June Schlueter.

“Students have different political backgrounds because of their different cultural backgrounds, and they approached the readings from different perspectives and reacted in different ways,” she says. “Dig down and find out why an individual has a particular perception, and you’ll see that diversity of backgrounds leads to diversity of perceptions. The idea of the first-year experience is to get all these out and to help students understand why people who come from different places have different perspectives on an issue.”

“When you think of what a college like Lafayette has to offer, you think of a great faculty, wonderful programs, great facilities, etc. But what parents should look at when choosing a college, in addition to all that, is the cohort of students that their son or daughter is going to be studying with,” Schlueter adds. “This is really important. With a critical mass of students who are intellectually stimulating and who are from a diversity of backgrounds, their son or daughter will be exposed to views that are different from their own. And you get the possibility of this elasticity of thinking that is so important for college-age students.”

For Gladstone A. (Fluney) Hutchinson, dean of studies, a student body that is diverse in the broad sense of the word facilitates a “natural symbiosis that enables students to become richer learners as a result of conversations with people who have different perspectives and different lenses on the world.”

Diversity benefits minority and majority students alike, says Ibrahima Bah ’06. “We all have our own bubble we live in, our own stereotypes. That’s where, in my opinion, diversity helps. It allows us the chance to communicate and gives people the chance to correct biases and stereotypes that are based on ignorance.”

Bah, who is pursuing B.S. degrees in physics and math, is one of 45 New York City high school students Lafayette has enrolled in the last four years through an alliance with the Posse Foundation. Posse identifies, recruits, and trains student leaders from urban public high schools to form multicultural teams called “posses.” The teams pursue their academics and help promote cross-cultural communication at top-tier colleges and universities nationwide following an intensive eight-month pre-college training program. In addition to New York, where Posse is headquartered, there are sites in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

Bah’s posse, which includes 11 students, will graduate this year. The classes of 2007, 2008, and 2009 have posses of 11, 11, and 12 students, respectively. The posses personify ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity and, with their variety of academic and cocurricular pursuits and extracurricular activities, the students enhance campus diversity broadly. They have succeeded academically (numerous dean’s list students and a group GPA of more than 3.0) and are leaders. Not one has dropped out. Next fall the College will enroll a posse from Washington, D.C., and one from New York, becoming just the fifth school to have posses from more than one city.

Posse’s primary selection criteria are leadership talent, ability to work in a team with people from diverse backgrounds, and desire to succeed, says Deborah Bial, the foundation’s founder and president. It uses what it calls the Dynamic Assessment Process to identify exceptional students who might be missed by traditional college admissions methods. The process begins with teachers, guidance counselors, principals, and community-based organizations nominating 6,000 students for 300 Posse scholarships each year. “Because the nominators know the students personally, we can say to them, ‘Think of the one kid you know who could do extraordinarily well at Lafayette but isn’t going to show up on the College’s radar screen.’ It takes them about two seconds to think of that student,”Bial says.

First, Posse staff members interact with 100 nominees in a large-group session and observe the candidates in small-group activities, such as building model robots, running discussion groups, and presenting in front of their peers. “We’re looking for things like leadership skills, public speaking skills, the ability to work well in a team, and problem-solving skills. We don’t even ask about SATs yet,” Bial says. Then the staff combines their observations of the group session with a review of students’ application materials to select students for one-on-one interviews.

The finalists’ interview, or workshop, is like no other. In Lafayette’s case, 25 students vie for 10 or so slots. They meet with Posse staff and four Lafayette representatives in a session that gives the school a chance to see them working in small groups to solve problems.

“We don’t just stand back and watch, we participate and we get to know these students in a way we can’t normally do,” McCarty says. “That is the big strength of Posse the way we can assess students’ discipline, motivation, drive–the qualities that translate into success at college, particularly when they are heading to a campus that is, initially, a very foreign experience for them.”

Bial says, “You’re seeing young people in all their glory– answering questions on the side, interacting with their peers–and assessing their leadership skills and abilities. Colleges don’t just have the typical scores on paper, they have a dynamic assessment.”

Speaking of dynamic, Bah, who lives in the Bronx and graduated from Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Manhattan, conducted research in radio astronomy for a year as an EXCEL Scholar working with Lyle Hoffman, professor of physics. He has also worked with astrophysicists Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History and David Helfand of Columbia. At the moment he’s writing a senior honors thesis and applying for a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

ACHIEVING GREAT THINGS

Bah’s family moved from his native Senegal to the United States when he was 13. His father “grew up under slave-like conditions [at] a traditional Islamic school in a remote village in Guinea,” writes Bah in an essay entitled 7quot;The Stories that Define Me” in last year’s edition of Aristeia, published by Hutchinson’s office to showcase outstanding students’ achievements and reflections.

“Because of this tumultuous period in his life, he vows to do whatever he must to make sure his children will never suffer a similar fate. . . . From my father’s story, I have learned that ‘impossible’ is a word that has meaning only if one allows it to become part of one’s vocabulary. It is not and will never become a part of mine. . . .” Bah writes. “I have learned to ask questions, and then to question the answers. I have set my sights and standards high, and have been successful thus far. If I don’t understand something, I refuse to give up until I do. These are the principles that have worked for me as I continue to achieve my dreams. They are the ones that worked for my father in achieving his dreams. I am sharing these principles and stories with anyone who wants to achieve great things. I know what I want to do, and nothing is going to stop me.”

Jocelyn Vargas ’06, who graduated as class valedictorian from Middle College High School at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, is a double major in international affairs and Spanish and president of Hispanic Society. She is a resident adviser in McKeen Hall and one of a handful of head residents who form the primary link between the RAs and the Office of Residence Life. She has received an offer for an event management position at Lehman Brothers in New York. She too is thriving.

To prepare for college, Posse scholars attend two-hour workshops each week for eight months on team-building and group support, cross–cultural communication, leadership and becoming an active agent of change on campus, and academic excellence. But, says Vargas, whose parents come from the Dominican Republic, all that still doesn’t quite prepare you for the culture shock you face when you arrive at Lafayette.

“You have to live it in order to feel it,” she says. “It was nothing like I’d ever experienced before. Some people would say, ‘Say that again, we love your accent!’ You wonder if people are looking at you as inferior because you pronounce things differently.”

Vargas cites that comment as one of just a few absurd remarks she’s heard from fellow students. She and Bah both view Lafayette as more culturally diverse than when they arrived, and indeed they have played a role in the change. Along the way, when they’ve felt frustrated or isolated, they’ve turned to their posse.

“That’s where having a posse is so helpful. I’ve relied on them as much as they’ve relied on me,” says mechanical engineering major Tito Anyanwu ’07, who grew up in Nigeria and moved, at age 14, to Brooklyn, where he graduated from Street Academy High School. “In our training we focused a lot on that bond in Posse, and on succeeding. We came here ready to succeed and we’ve been holding onto that.”

The success of Posse fits well with Weiss’ view of diversity and how to achieve it. He says it’s too soon to discuss specifics, but his vision “at 30,000 feet” is clear.

“If we begin with the premise that diversity is a core value here, then everything we do every day has some diversity component in mind. That means the curriculum we build reflects an interest in pluralism, as does our recruitment of faculty and staff. If you want a truly diverse workplace or a truly diverse student body you might have to use less-conventional methods of evaluation than the ones used traditionally. In our practices for recruiting faculty, in particular, we want to make sure that we are casting the net as widely as we can,” Weiss says.

“In our recruitment of students, same thing. Posse’s a perfect example—they have this thing figured out. They know what they’re doing and they’re enormously successful. If we’ve learned nothing else from Posse, we have learned that there are other measures for how to think about bringing students into this community. Posse uses an enlightened, subtle, nuanced evaluative system, and their students are every bit as successful as ours.

“The problem of real diversity, as a core value, is a fundamental question. It is not as easy to enact a vision around that priority because you are talking about re-evaluating the ways in which we think about access. So that means that if we want to have diversity as a core value, we have to rethink our premises, and that’s hard. That’s controversial. That’s risky.”

In discussing diversity, Weiss repeatedly cites “students of merit.”

“If you slip away from a definition of merit, then you have entitlement programs, then you are compromising standards, and then we’re in a different business. Lafayette College is not interested in that. The question is, how do you find these people and support them so they can be successful on your terms?”