Our Plan is focused on providing free UO summer camp experiences for low income middle school kids. The short version is as follows:
- Give 8th graders from low income Oregon families a free two week UO summer camp enrichment program. Show them what college is like, and what they must do to prepare for it. Follow up with these children each year. When they are seniors, help them with admissions and financial aid. Give them targeted mentoring and financial support when they come to UO, so that they stay and succeed.
- Make the program sensitive to the children's race and ethnicity, but base eligibility only on parent's income and education, a group which will include many minority children. All of these kids need and deserve a fair start.
- Involve UO students and faculty in the camp programs. They will be better off for seeing the tough circumstances that low-income Oregon families face.
- Get UO back on track to be a top-tier research institution. When these students graduate, we want their diplomas to mean as much as possible. Do this by increasing what we spend on recruiting and keeping the best graduate students and faculty - regardless of race.
- Provide clear goals and a budget for this plan. Specify how much we can spend on this program, how many children can be served, and how much we will use to improve graduate student and faculty recruitment and retention. Evaluate this program annually and make a public report on its cost and results.
The UO Economics department ran a pilot of this program in early August 2006 and is repeating it again in 2007. This Daily Emerald story by Ryan Knutson gives some details.
Our rationale and a more detailed draft is on the left. The posts below explain more about the events at UO that have created the need for an alternative plan for promoting diversity. Frankly, much of it is petty academic politics. But the need to do something different at UO is real and important.
The UO administration has now spent 6 years and probably over $2 million just on salaries for diversity administrators, and they still don't have a diversity plan! Check out their website if you find this hard to believe. Think what this money could have done.
Legal Problems
In May of 2007, President Frohnmayer finally signed the latest UO Affirmative Action plan and it was posted at the UO AAEO website. The plan was backdated, perhaps to make it appear that it had been signed and in effect since January 2006. (Federal regs require annual updates.) Here is the table from the 2004 plan, showing that UO faculty is generally representative, in terms minority status. The UO administration, on the other hand, is not. Not much has changed in the new "2006" plan.
UO Counsel Melinda Grier and President Frohmayer did everything possible to keep UO's earlier AA plans secret. Here are some of the emails about this, including some interesting attempts to charge me $250 just to look at these public documents. I was surprised that the Oregon Attorney General's Office, which is supposed to enforce the Public Records laws, went along with this.
I bargained Ms Grier down to $150, and then introduced a motion to the UO Senate and she and Frohnmayer finally agreed to deposit them in the UO Archives at no charge. Part of the reason for their reluctance was probably the fact that UO had never completed or had lost many of the AA reports, as this Daily Emerald story notes. In an email to me, President Frohmayer says he does not remember if he ever saw or signed the missing plans.
Here is President Frohnmayer's May 14 2006 Diversity Plan (Adopted by the Senate on May 24)
Here is a pdf of a memo that details the specific legal problems with President Frohnmayer's Diversity Plan.
Here is UO Counsel and Oregon Assistant Attorney General Linda Grier's opinion that the plan is legal.
However, Ms Grier's opinion also states that
"The Supreme Court has established a number of factors under which race and sex may be considered in employment decisions. The Court looks to see if the action unnecessarily trammels the rights of others, is a temporary means to correct a manifest imbalance or underrepresentation, contains only goals not quotas, makes distinctions between comparably qualified individuals and is part of an adopted affirmative action plan. (emphasis in orig.)
The latter point is crucial in this analysis. ... "
UO's most recent Affirmative Action plan is from 2004, and does not address most of the provisions of the diversity plan, so by the UO Counsel's statement, it would not appear to be legal.
Court Jurisdiction over UO Diversity
Court Jurisdiction over UO Diversity (minor edits to email sent to all UO faculty on 5/15/2006)
Please forgive this lengthy mass email. I felt it was important for people to have this information before the 5/24 Senate meeting. Details and documents about the statements below, including a pdf of the legal settlement referred to in this message, are posted at the website at the bottom. The Daily Emerald story, with more details, is here.
UO's efforts to devise and implement a diversity plan are currently under the jurisdiction of Judge Coffin of the US District Court. President Frohnmayer confirmed this last Thursday.
The US District Court has jurisdiction because of a legal agreement between Provost Moseley, UO, and Dr. Joseph Wade. Dr. Wade is an administrator with 28 years of service at UO, and an African-American. Dr. Wade sued the UO after leaving his job involuntarily in 2001. In part A of section III of the settlement, UO agreed to take a list of specific steps related to diversity, including the hiring of a Vice Provost for Institutional Diversity and the development and implementation of a diversity plan. Part J of the agreement states that the Court shall retain jurisdiction over this matter until June, 2008.
UO has not yet satisfied the terms of its agreement with Dr. Wade, which calls not only for the development, but also for the implementation of a diversity plan. We are now 4 years into the 6 years of court jurisdiction.
The administration has chosen not to disclose this situation to many, and perhaps all, of the faculty members, students, and community participants who have been working, meeting, and debating, over the past two years, to develop the UO's diversity plans. Former Vice Provost for Institutional Diversity Greg Vincent reportedly was not told of the legal settlement when he was hired.
The Senate has now been asked to approve a diversity plan, when many Senators and Faculty members still do not know the history and the current legal situation.
The plan submitted to the Senate on Sunday by President Frohnmayer requires a new round of planning at the college and department level before implementation. We still do not have a document with goals that are tied to specific budget recommendations - something generally considered to be an essential element of an effective plan.
Meanwhile, UO has just slipped to second-tier in a national research ranking. We are cutting programs that are important to our academic mission; faculty salaries and graduate student stipends are not competitive with top-tier institutions. We estimate that UO’s annual diversity expenditures are about $3 million, excluding the amounts spent on students. To put this into some perspective, it is about $1,500 for each one of the poorest 10% of UO students, or about $4,000 per faculty, annually. The administration’s submission to the Senate simply says “Fiscal Impact Statement: The drafters of the Plan have provided no fiscal impact statement.”
We believe that UO needs a new process for diversity planning. The administration must fully inform the faculty about the legal situation. The budgeting process must be transparent. The committees for this new process need to be representative of all the different legitimate interests that are involved.
We do not think that we can spend another year on this process, or on the development of individual department plans as in the Frohnmayer proposal, without some action.
The plan we propose is based on "filling the pipeline," and has these basic elements:
- Give 8th graders from low income Oregon families a free two week UO summer camp enrichment program. Show them what college is like, and what they must do to prepare for it. Follow up with these children each year. When they are seniors, help them with admissions and financial aid. Give them targeted mentoring and financial support when they come to UO, so that they stay and succeed.
- Make the program sensitive to the children's race and ethnicity, but base eligibility only on parent's income and education, a group which will include many minority children. All of these kids need and deserve a fair start.
- Get UO back on track to be a top-tier research institution. When these students graduate, we want their diplomas to mean as much as possible. Do this by increasing what we spend on recruiting and keeping top faculty - regardless of race.
- Provide clear goals and a budget. Specify how much we can spend on this program, how many children can be served, and how much we will use to improve faculty recruitment and retention. Evaluate this program annually and make a public report on its cost and results.
UO has a summer enrichment program with the infrastructure in place, but it has little money for scholarships of the sort we propose. A pilot version of our plan could be implemented this summer by offering additional scholarships for low-income students. We could evaluate the effectiveness of this approach as early as 2007, by comparing the participants’ enrollment in college prep classes with that of a control group.
This pilot could be easily funded by cuts to the administrative budget of the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, currently $430,000. We could reduce OIED to one administrator and a staff member, and have enough money for 200 students in this pilot.
We ask the UO faculty and Senate to please consider this alternative, as they debate the administration’s current proposal.
Yours,
Bill Harbaugh, Economics
Website: http://oregondiversityplan.com