Twelveonline Volume 13, Issue 2
|
||
|
STILL HERE... by Lionel C. Barrow, Jr.  The headline in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" Jan. 14, 2005 issue read "Michigan: Who Really Won?" The subhead said "colleges' cautious reaction to the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decisions may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory." The article continues "many institutions are acting as if they lost the Michigan cases – indeed, as if the Supreme Court had actually banned affirmative action" – which it did not do.Carnegie Mellon, Harvard and Yale are three of the schools that the Chronicle article indicated are backsliding. They have "quietly opened a wide range of what were once exclusively minority scholarships and programs to students of any race." Princeton, which did this last year for its Newspaper Fund Summer Minority Workshop, also belongs on this list. The article, written by Jeffrey Selingo, also documents a mixed picture for minority enrollments after the Michigan decision. The article lists seven schools that have seen a drop in enrollment in black and Hispanic freshmen. Three of the seven (Michigan State, Ohio State and Georgia) also have major undergraduate programs in journalism and mass communications. A fourth school (Michigan) has an undergraduate program in communication studies. Fortunately there were some schools that registered increases in both black and Hispanic enrollments. Five of them (Penn State, Maryland, Texas-Austin, Washington and Wisconsin-Madison) have undergraduate programs in journalism/mass communications. The opponents of Affirmative Action are hard at work. The article said two of them (the Center for Equal Opportunity and the American Civil Rights Institute) are sending letters to colleges "threatening to file complaints [on the basis of the Supreme Court decisions] with the Education Department Office for Civil Rights" where they "have found a sympathetic ear." What this means to me is that the minority pool from which we drawn our majors may well be shrinking. What this also means is that if we really are committed to diversifying our j/mc student bodies and through us the media, we have to intensify our own recruiting in the inner city high schools and in the community colleges where minorities are clustering. We with the help of the minority media organizations need to encourage these prospects to seriously think about journalism as a vocation, help them apply to our colleges, encourage them to work on our campus media, which as one recruiter has told me, too often are virtually lilly-white bastions for fraternity and sorority members, and not let them get lost on our campuses once they arrive. |