EDUCATION : Deep-South Campus Chips Away at Entrenched Biases

More than 1,700 miles separate the stately campus of Tulane University from the center of Los Angeles, but to George Strickler, the places have almost become one.

“There’s an unfortunate parallel between this university and Los Angeles,” said Strickler, an associate professor of law at Tulane. “We both have had a racial problem to deal with, and we’ve both, in my opinion, failed in that effort. In Los Angeles, there’s been rioting in the streets, an agitation for change. At Tulane, we’ve had an angry debate on how to effect change, but ultimately we came down on the side of the status quo. Neither place presents a good example.”

Central to Strickler’s comments is a vote taken last month by the university’s Board of Administrators endorsing the concept of affirmative action and equal employment opportunity but stopping far short of a more ambitious program, known as the Initiatives for the Race and Gender Enrichment of Tulane University.

That initiative called for the active recruitment of black, women and other minority faculty members and for a series of controversial programs that would encourage multicultural courses and weed out racism and sexism on the Tulane campus through a series of university-sponsored workshops.

With its original wording asserting that “racism and sexism are pervasive in America,” and “for the most part, subconscious or at least subsurface,” the initiative also suggested the use of an “enrichment liaison person” in each department to inform the administration about the initiative’s progress on campus.

“It was from beginning to end an absolutely Orwellian document,” said William B. Gwyn, a professor of political science and one of its principal opponents. “It called on faculty members to spy on one another, for quotas, and for a whole series of programs which could be conveniently placed under the label of ‘political correctness.’ ”

Soon the Tulane faculty was split over the proposal, which also caused divisions of opinion in the city.

“There has been a lot of anger in the air over this,” said Tulane’s senior vice president, Ronald Mason Jr. “I think everyone is still talking to one another, but it may take a while for some of the wounds to heal.”

That such an initiative even made it to the discussion stage at Tulane, however, surprised many. Established in 1824, Tulane for decades was a whites-only institution catering to this city’s social and financial elite. National civil rights laws in the 1960s opened admissions to black and other minority students, but it was Eamon Kelly, president of Tulane since 1981, who really launched the move for a more diversified community.

“We had a five-year plan to increase the number of minority students on campus and that plan is now four years old and we’ve kept pace with it,” Mason said.

Faculty integration, however, has proven a more stubborn matter: With a total faculty of nearly 500, 100 are women and 12 are black.

The picture is hardly unique, said Iris Molotsky of the American Assn. of University Professors. Tighter university budgets and salary inequities have only made such issues even more explosive, she said.

By the time the 24-member Tulane Board of Administrators--22 of whom are white men--voted for a more moderate and less controversial race and gender hiring policy last month, few people on campus were happy either. Some said the statement merely reflected Tulane’s “good ol’ boy” history. Critics like Gwyn, on the other hand, said the decision was only the latest skirmish in a larger national battle: “All we tried to do was halt any proposal to make race or gender a qualification for getting a job. But it doesn’t end here--universities across the country are going to face similar challenges.”

Yet Mason, the university’s first black vice president, expressed satisfaction with the final policy decision. “What happened in Los Angeles . . . is an example, I think, of what can happen when people don’t talk about racial issues. We did here, and I see it all as part of an ongoing process to make this institution better.”