Black Students Seek Rehiring of University Executive : Race: He was hired to ease tensions, but his dismissal inflamed them. Protesters and the school argue if the firing stemmed from style or performance.

Sauntering out of the Ohio Bell Telephone Co. headquarters at lunchtime, a middle-aged man was greeted the other day by a familiar sight: 25 or so chanting demonstrators marching in a circle in front of the building. “This is becoming a Friday ritual,” he said, stopping for a while to watch with a friend before moving on.

The well-behaved demonstrators, who also have regularly targeted other downtown sites since their protest began June 29, are mostly Cleveland State University students. In what some are calling one of the longest campus protests since the 1960s, black students at the university are campaigning for the reinstatement of a black university vice president.

The firing of Raymond A. Winbush last June, 10 months after he started his job, has galvanized the black community in Cleveland as have few other controversies in recent years, in part because Winbush was hired in direct response to charges of racism at the state-supported university.

As vice president for minority affairs and human relations, he was supposed to help resolve racial tension. Now his firing has sparked an even louder uproar that echoes growing racial tensions on college campuses across the country. It also has generated a communitywide debate over what the role of the 25-year-old “urban” university should be.

The problem, some say, was Winbush’s aggressive and sometimes confrontational style in dealing with racial issues.

“He was brought here to do his job and he did an excellent job, but they didn’t like the way he did it,” said Gloria Rice, the mother of one of the student protesters.

Charging that University President John A. Flower did not want to seriously address racial concerns, student protest leader Dante Merriweather said: “He wanted a Tom in the job. He thought he bought one.”

Merriweather, backed by area ministers and political leaders and a growing number of national civil rights figures, vowed that the demonstrations would continue until Winbush is reinstated. Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil rights leader, recently came to campus to lend moral support to the students. He was preceded the previous week by Joseph Lowery, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Protesters said they expect other national civil rights leaders to lend their support in coming weeks.

But Flower, in the face of this mounting pressure, vows that Winbush will never be rehired. Flower has rebuffed efforts by outside parties, including the U.S. Justice Department and the mayor’s office, to mediate the issue. Differing styles, he said, is not the issue--”the issue is performance.”

Winbush’s position was created three years ago after then-City Council President George Forbes charged the university with racism, and a U.S. Labor Department investigation had found that some black employees at the university were victims of racism.

Winbush was hired away from Vanderbilt University, where he was director of the black cultural center. His problems began almost immediately, he said.

Winbush said he should have known there would be problems when Flower wrote him a letter before he began his Cleveland job that said in part: “We must be careful not to let the misperception emerge that you are the black community’s instrument to get a bigger piece of CSU.”

Winbush and his supporters contend that, since blacks and Latinos are inequitably represented in the student body and work force at the university, a “bigger piece of CSU” is exactly what they need.

“That statement alone has outraged the black community,” Winbush said. “It sent a shock wave through me when I read it . . . . We could triple, in fact we could quadruple, the rate of black graduates and still be just at the national average.”

Winbush was asked by trustees to prepare a report on minority student retention rates and goals. When it was completed in November, Flower criticized it as inadequate, inaccurate and polemical, and he extensively edited it before turning it over to the board of trustees. Winbush and his supporters contend that Flower wanted to water it down.

According to the university, 16.1% of the 18,535 students are members of minority groups and 11.6% of that number are black, making Cleveland State second in Ohio only to a traditionally black school in minority enrollment among public universities. Flower said minority enrollment increased 5.9% from the 1986-87 school year to September, 1989. In addition, the university says minorities are 16.3% of the faculty.

Winbush and his supporters contend, however, that the university’s figures are inflated. He also said the retention rate for black students is low, arguing that, although blacks were 10.7% of the 1986 enrollment, they were only 6.3% of the graduating class.

But, even if the university’s figures are accurate, Winbush and his supporters argue that Cleveland State, as an urban university with open enrollment policies, should strive to more closely approximate the population of the city. Cleveland’s population is 52% black and the county is about 30% black.

Flower contends that “no one has tried harder than I have to work with the various minority communities here in Cleveland to help improve their participation here at CSU. We want blacks to have more opportunity at CSU.”

Flower stresses, though, that when he refers to minorities he means Cleveland’s large Eastern European community as well as blacks, Latinos, women and the handicapped. And, although the university is “part and parcel of Cleveland and the Greater Cleveland area, at the same time we have to strive to maintain . . . the integrity of what the university is,” he said.

That means, in essence, that the university has to protect itself in some measure from the pressures exerted upon it by minority groups, the Legislature, the business community and others “who justifiably perceive themselves as having a vested interest in the university,” he said.

Winbush’s main problem, Flower said, was that he was “not functioning within the ground rules” so necessary to running a large organization.

Students continue to hold protest marches at businesses owned by members of the university board of trustees. And a 24-hour sit-in has continued since June 29th.

Last month, seven protesters were arrested for entering Tower City Center, the city’s new showcase retail development downtown that is managed by a company headed by a Cleveland State trustee.

But as campus protests go, this one is particularly well-behaved. The 30 to 50 students staging a sit-in at the administration building--now in its sixth week--are attended by a contingent of lawyers and an auxiliary group headed by parents, who bring meals and issue press releases. A schedule of events is distributed to the media weekly.

The times, as somebody once said, are a’changing. But then, King’s son, on his visit to campus last week, had a rejoinder: “History has a way of repeating itself . . . .

“We are dealing with problems here,” he told black students, “that we thought we had dealt with in the ‘60s.”