Presented to the UW-Madison Plan 2008 Steering Committee, February, 1999The campus 2008 Steering Committee and its four Working Groups, led by cochairs Professor Bernice Durand of the University Committee, and Paul W. Barrows, Associate Vice Chancellor for Administration, and assisted by Ruby Paredes acting as the Committee’s executive secretary, have produced a well-organized and sharply focused set of recommendations to guide the UW-Madison in implementing the goals of the UW System Board of Regents’ Plan 2008: Educational Quality Through Racial and Ethnic Diversity. Having observed the final two of the Committee’s four meetings last semester, it is clear that the challenge of pulling together the efforts of the more than 100 people involved in this effort has been formidable. I commend the authors for their work.
Now, after reading and reflecting on the draft report, I offer my reactions.
The draft reminds me of a long series of earlier UW-Madison affirmative action/diversity reports, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1990s. These reports were all put together by substantial committees; all convey the noteworthy objective of achieving a more diverse campus; all reflect a fervent commitment to that objective; all indicate what is to be done and who is responsible for doing it. Most important, all presume that the recommendations will be carried out and that the proposed programs will be capable of achieving the objectives they are designed to facilitate.
Despite the laudatory intentions and strong commitment, past and current efforts failed to make any progress toward the campus’ three long-term objectives: (1) eliminating the underrepresentation of targeted minority groups among entering freshmen; (2) eliminating the gap for minorities in their second-year retention rates; and (3) eliminating the gap for minorities in their six-year graduation rates.
What these efforts have accomplished is to create a substantial diversity “infrastructure” of administrative officials in Bascom Hall, the various colleges, and elsewhere across the campus. These people have worked diligently in the interests of diversity but also without appreciable success in reaching the three key long-term objectives.
Had more progress been made, there might be no need for yet another diversity plan.
- In 1976, the UW-Madison faculty committed itself to realizing its diversity goals. By 1979, there would be no more underrepresentation of minorities. And, no later than 1981, the gap in retention rates would be eliminated! Neither of these goals were met!
- In 1984, the Board of Regents set new diversity targets. It called for campuses to equalize minority enrollment and retention rates by 1988 and to equalize minority graduation rates by 1993. These deadlines came and went.
- In 1987, the UW-Madison “Holley Report” proposed many new programs, some of which were incorporated in Chancellor Shalala’s early 1998 Madison Plan and likewise in the UW System Design for Diversity Plan. The Madison Plan called for doubling freshmen minority enrollment within three years. But that never happened.
- In 1996 Chancellor Ward made an institutional commitment to the diversity goals of the Civil Rights Defense Coalition, a student group. A key goal called for eliminating the underrepresentation of new minority freshmen groups by the year 2000. The campus is quite unlikely to meet that target.
In short, we have report piled on report, recommendations piled on recommendations, commitments piled on commitments. Nevertheless, the campus’s long-run diversity goals seemingly remain as elusive as ever. With this in mind, what kind of a report might we have expected to deal decisively with the diversity issue? We need only recall over the past two years the several emotional restatements of the institution’s campus commitment to diversity coming from campus leaders in Bascom Hall and from the Faculty Senate. Indeed, both groups warmly embraced the draft of the Board of Regents’ Plan 2008 when it came up for discussion a year ago.I am disappointed in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Plan 2008. In my view, this campus is capable of taking a much more forceful and informed view of the challenge posed by the diversity issue. I would have hoped for the following:
- Describing accurately the progress that has been made in the past decade. The Madison Plan 2008 opens with the words: “The University of Wisconsin-Madison has made real progress [emphasis added] in the past ten years toward a more diverse and welcoming campus.” Is this a true statement? Or it is wishful thinking? What is the evidence for this assertion?
- Prioritizing the Plan’s four major goals and eight subgoals, as well as its 45 recommendations. Each goal and recommendation is represented as equally important to the cause of diversity. How can the campus focus its efforts while simultaneously trying to advance 45 different and apparently equally important recommendations? This will be difficult when the campus is simultaneously pursuing a multitude of other goals and recommendations, for improving undergraduate education, undertaking strategic recruitment of new faculty, reinvigorating the Wisconsin Idea, strengthening the curriculum, maintaining the campus’s research preeminence, and who knows what all else. So, what are the priorities?
- Defining a set of objective measures against which progress under Madison Plan 2008 can be determined. The vagueness of the recommendations and their listed outcomes will make it difficult for anyone to establish whether and to what degree Madison Plan 2008 and its constituent elements are succeeding as the Plan unfolds and at its conclusion. The idea behind the UW System Design for Diversity was that its outcomes would be measurable and could be evaluated. We are still waiting for a comprehensive report on whether and to what extent the Design for Diversity plan succeeded on this campus. Similarly, we also await a final report on the impact of the 1988 Madison Plan, and on the 1993 Madison Commitment. (I look forward to the year 2000 when it will be possible to evaluate Chancellor Ward’s commitment to the enrollment goal put forth by the Civil Rights Defense Coalition.)
- Setting out the accountability standards that will be used in evaluating the implementation and success of programs established to achieve the goals of Madison Plan 2208. The draft proposal lists many campus officials who will be held accountable, including the Chancellor, Provost, Associate Vice Chancellors, Assistant Vice Chancellors, Deans, Directors, Department Chairs, Graduate School Dean, Professional School Deans, Director of Equity and Diversity Resource Center, Academic Staff Human Resources Director, Admissions Director, Student Financial Aid Director, Ethnic Studies Directors, and the list goes on. Will any of the people in these positions be brought to account if they prove not to be accountable? What is the range of penalties they might suffer? Lest it appear that administrators will bear the full burden of accountability, certain other groups are strangely omitted. How will faculty be held accountable? Will it be through the University Committee, the Faculty Senate, or through key Faculty Senate Committees such as the Committee on Admissions Policy, the Committee on Academic Affairs of Minority/Disadvantaged Students, or Equity and Diversity Committees in the various colleges and departments? Will any individual faculty members be held accountable? If so, how? These issues must be considered quickly because the stated deadlines for Plan 2008 outcomes range from “Immediate” to “Summer 1999,” and to “Fall 1999,” “Spring 2000,” and “Fall 2000.”
- Providing documented evidence attesting to the strong likelihood that recommended programs can or will produce their predicted effects. The current proposal offers no empirical support for its many recommendations. Based on discussions at meetings of the Madison Plan 2008 Steering Committee, many recommendations were tossed on the table as self-evidently effective. But, how likely is it, for example, that the proposed one-semester freshman required course with its diversity component will contribute to increased racial/ethnic understanding and thereby increase retention rates for both minorities and nonminority student groups? More basically, what will be the nature of the course? Who will teach it? Are there faculty from all four divisions who are ready and able to teach such a course? Is there not a danger that the course will cross the narrow line that divides instruction from indoctrination?
- Acknowledging the role of preferential admissions for targeted minority students as an integral component of campus diversity policy. This report, as with all past reports, is silent on the issue of preferential admissions for minority applicants. In fact, preferential admission for minorities has come to be viewed as an accepted if implicit component of campus diversity policy. The paradox is that even with preferential admissions, UW-Madison remains far short of reaching its enrollment, retention, and graduation goals for targeted minority students. Moreover, eliminating preferential admissions for minorities, while lowering freshmen enrollment rates, would actually increase second-year retention and six-year graduation rates.
- Recognizing that the key obstacle to enhancing campus diversity is the low level of academic achievement of many minority high school graduates. By my estimates, no more than 5 percent of Wisconsin’s Black high school graduates, as contrasted to about 25 percent of White high school graduates, can be considered competitive applicants to UW-Madison, meaning they would be admitted by the same standard applied to non-targeted applicants. This 5 percent figures works out to be 100-125 of the state’s Black high school graduates. The weak academic preparation of minority high school graduates reflects, in turn, the weak academic achievement of targeted minority groups. The lagging academic performance of minority students can be traced back to the 10th grade, and then back to the 8th grade, and finally back to the 4th grade, based on data from the 1997-98 Wisconsin Student Assessment System. To illustrate, of the 5,011 Black Wisconsin 10th graders, their prospects for admission look bleak. Those receiving “advanced” scores in reading number only 192. Unfortunately, the Madison Plan 2008 barely acknowledges the tragically weak academic achievement of so many targeted minority students.
- Elaborating the costs of implementing the Madison Plan 2008 proposals. How much will it cost annually over the next 10 years to implement the full array of recommendations? How much money has been or will be budgeted to support diversity programs over the next biennium? By the campus? By the System? By the State of Wisconsin? By the UW Foundation? By the personal monetary contributions of faculty and academic staff proponents of diversity? If the funds available are insufficient to finance the full array of recommendations, what will be the effect on reaching the seven goals listed in Madison Plan 2008? What proposals will have to be scrapped? Who will decide, and on what basis, which programs will be retained and which will be scrapped?
To summarize, the Madison Plan 2008 draft displays that same shortcomings found in former Chancellor Shalala’s 1988 top-down Madison Plan, in former UW System President Buzz Shaw’s top-down Design for Diversity, and in Chancellor David Ward’s 1996 top-down institutional commitment to the diversity goals of the Civil Rights Defense Coalition, and the UW System Board of Regent’s top-down “umbrella” Plan 2008: Educational Quality through Racial/Ethnic Diversity. Surely the UW-Madison can do better than this.