March Toward Multiethnic Goal Remakes Occidental : Colleges: Diversity of enrollment, faculty and courses is a top priority. Some alumni, students say change is too fast.

Less than 10 miles from Downtown Los Angeles, a small, selective college is choosing its students according to a simple--but controversial--premise: human potential cannot be measured in mere numbers.

More than 2,000 students apply to Occidental College in Eagle Rock each year. Only two-thirds make the cut--and they are not only those with the very best grades and highest test scores.

Admissions officers are far more interested in applicants’ personal essays, the difficulty of their high school course work, the recommendations of their teachers and the viewpoints and experiences they will contribute to their freshman class.

It is affirmative action in its broadest sense, a process that considers race one of several factors to be weighed when sorting through the applicant pool.

As a private liberal arts college, Occidental is not obligated to make its student body more diverse. The 108-year-old institution does so by choice because its leaders believe that a multicultural education is a better education.

“We are trying to identify what a society can be when there is the true presence of equity,” President John Brooks Slaughter said of the experiment over which he is presiding. The effort, now in its seventh year, makes ethnic diversity a top priority for Occidental’s student body, faculty and curriculum.

The experiment began in 1987, when Occidental created its Multicultural Summer Institute to better prepare minorities and other disadvantaged freshmen for college-level work. But broader changes began the next year, when trustees made Slaughter--then the chancellor of the University of Maryland--the first black president of a private, largely white institution.

From the start, Slaughter sought to end Occidental’s isolation from urban Los Angeles. And he was outspoken in his view that minority enrollment--then about 22%--was far too low.

Slowly, sometimes with difficulty, Occidental set out to broaden the traditional definition of academic excellence. In the face of stiff criticism from alumni, among others, officials have held to the conviction that a college education is incomplete if it fails to give students insights into others unlike themselves.

“Nobody comes here as a stereotype,” said economics professor Manuel Pastor. “Giving that meaning is really important.”

It may be important, but it hasn’t been easy. As ethnic diversity has increased--blacks, Latinos and Native Americans now make up about 27% of Occidental’s 1,600 students, and Asians make up 17%--the level of tension on campus has risen as well.

Some students chafe at the new curriculum, introduced last year, that requires them to complete a cross-cultural, historical study of Western and non-Western societies, featuring courses such as “As We See Each Other: Mutual Images of East and West” and “Race, Class and Gender: Women of Color in the United States.”

Others complain that by allowing a special multicultural dormitory and a proliferation of ethnic clubs, the administration has overemphasized students’ differences, making it harder for them to come together as a whole.

“I had never seen myself as white until I got to Oxy,” said John Whitbeck, a 19-year-old sophomore who plays center for the Occidental Tigers football team. “I never thought, ‘This is what people think of me because I’m white.’ . . . Occidental is a real shock.”

Discussing Differences

Undeniably, the college’s commitment to diversity permeates the eucalyptus-lined campus. There are new course offerings, such as a seminar on Rastafarianism. The faculty is nearly one-quarter minority, up from less than 9% a decade ago. And to gauge the diversity of the student body, one need only visit the Quad at the center of campus, where students of all complexions gather to eat lunch.

It seems that every week, posters appear on campus urging students to talk about how they are getting along, whether at a forum on the pressures minorities feel to not sell out their own communities or a discussion about whether whites have a place in multiculturalism.

And the same topics frequently work their way into the classroom, both by accident and design, as professors encourage students to apply lessons from their own lives to the things they learn.

When her class was having trouble recently digesting Karl Marx’s theories on social class and inequality, sociology professor Monique Taylor used the students’ own differences to get the point across.

“Let’s talk about our own class backgrounds--I think that might be affecting why you’re not able to talk about this,” she remembers telling them. “How do you dress on campus? Do you own a car? In your neighborhood at home, did people own their own houses?”

The answers came from across a broad spectrum of experience--from the student whose father was a corporate chief executive officer to his classmate whose father worked in a factory.

“In another moment in another setting you really would have been talking with only elite kids,” Taylor said. “But this is the true nature of a university--a conflict of opinions and ideas.”

Collaboration

That conflict sometimes generates tension is an acceptable trade-off, some Occidental faculty members say. In fact, many encourage their students to take risks and reach out to others, even when that doesn’t feel comfortable.

“Don’t just crawl back into a hole because some overture you made is rebuffed. You’ve got to be a little bit tenacious about this,” professor Eric Newhall tells his freshman English classes. “In a democratic society, people have to say what’s on their minds.”

Professors say they know that merely putting students next to one another in class will not make racial stereotypes magically melt away. But they believe students who work together reap social and educational rewards--a deeper knowledge of the subjects they are studying, and a broader understanding of the world in which they live.

“If you get a bunch of students of diverse backgrounds together and say, ‘Relate!,’ what does that mean?” asked Peter Mullin, the chairman of Occidental’s board of trustees. “A better litmus test is how do you get along while working toward a common goal?”

With that in mind, the college emphasizes “collaborative learning.” Pastor, the economics professor, offers incentives to students to write their papers in teams. And in addition to teaching them the fundamentals of economic theory, he uses role-playing to force students to examine their own assumptions about economics--and about the world.

“If you stopped long enough to say, ‘What if I was African American?’ you might understand the reaction to the O.J. [Simpson] verdict,” he said. “If you stopped long enough to make yourself Latino, you would understand why Proposition 187 was such a threat, even though it’s just about illegal aliens. People don’t do that. People need to do that.”

Even in science classes, where the subject matter is less likely to prompt ideological debate, diversity makes a difference.

“The content of what I’m teaching is not affected by multiculturalism and diversity. My style is--and that’s appropriate,” said physics professor Phil Arcuni, who said that ethnic and gender diversity has caused the physics department to make changes that were probably long overdue.

“The department has made a commitment that we are going to teach students physics, instead of just putting it out there and having the 10% who learn it, learn it,” he said. He encourages students to study in groups and sometimes requires them to have their homework approved by a classmate before it is turned in.

Not everybody is happy with the way things are working out. Last spring, a group of students set out to counter what they consider the school’s liberal bias by creating “Veritas,” a new publication that seeks “to present credible, intellectual conservative arguments rarely presented in the Occidental classroom.”

And the most recent yearbook took a gentle poke at the school by dubbing 1995 “Another PC Year.”

The college, which costs about $23,000 a year, has had financial difficulties that some blame on the diversification effort. Two-thirds of its students now receive some sort of financial aid, eating up nearly a quarter of the university’s $55-million annual operating budget.

Those rising costs, in addition to other fiscal problems, have forced some layoffs and have meant two years without raises for faculty and staff.

Due to a concerted hiring effort, the faculty has become less homogeneous--29 black, Latino or Asian tenure-track professors have come to the college since 1989. But as the curriculum has changed to reflect that, there have been strains of resentment.

At times, said Arthe Anthony, a black American studies professor, “You would think the minority faculty were running the place or something. We’re not.”

And there are other concerns. Biology professor Jon Keeley, says many members of the science faculty believe the administration’s haste to make the campus a multicultural success has meant “a shift in resources away from academics and toward a social agenda.”

“I don’t think anybody would want to come out and say they’re against diversity. What they think is a mistake is to change the institution overnight,” said Keeley, who has seen his budget for essentials like laboratory equipment cut in recent years. “It’s better to have this sort of thing evolve rather than having a revolution.”

President Slaughter, meanwhile, has lost count of the number of letters he’s received from alumni who want Occidental to remain exactly as they remember it. The common refrain, he said, is that Occidental is sacrificing its quality in order to promote minority education.

The median standardized test scores of entering freshmen are about 70 points lower today than before Occidental began its broad-based affirmative action campaign. But Slaughter rejects the notion that Occidental’s quality has been diminished.

“Some people say, ‘If your SAT scores are . . . lower today than they were 10 years ago, that means your students aren’t as good.’ Well, it doesn’t mean that at all,” Slaughter said. “Some say, ‘All you’re trying to do is create a minority institution.’ I say, ‘No, diversity is that which occurs at the intersection of excellence and equity.’ ”

Apparently, Slaughter’s arguments have proved convincing. Despite the grumbling, alumni donations to the college are at a record high. In last year’s fund drive, more than a third of the alumni contributed, raising more than $1.3 million.

High Graduation Rate

And judging by the traditional measures of excellence, Occidental must be doing something right. The percentage of the school’s students who graduate in four years is far higher than the national average among all four-year colleges and minority graduation rates are better than those of the University of California.

Of students who enrolled at Occidental in 1990, 85% of Latinos graduated in four years, 83% of Asian Americans, 69% of whites, and 62% of blacks. At UC, the six-year graduation rate is 66% for Latinos, 76% for Asian Americans, 77% for whites and 58% for blacks.

Within the last two years, Occidental students have received several national honors, including a Rhodes scholarship, a Marshall scholarship and two Truman scholarships. And the school is known to provide a strong preparation for medical school--in 1994, 2% of all Latinos admitted to the nation’s medical schools were Occidental graduates.

Slaughter says diversity is not just an academic exercise, but one that will pay off for students when they enter the real world. No, he admits, experience in a multiethnic college environment won’t get each Occidental graduate a job.

“But it’ll help him keep it,” he said.

Critics charge that the focus on diversity has led, ironically, to a kind of Balkanization, with students self-segregating on campus. But Andie Gonzalez, an Occidental junior, said outsiders hold the college up to an unrealistic standard--”an idealistic vision where everyone is singing ‘Kumbaya.’ ”

There are cliques on campus, she and other students admit, and people of the same ethnicity often hang around together. But in the classroom and in the dorms, Gonzalez said, connections are being made--whether she’s borrowing a black friend’s shampoo or explaining to a wealthier classmate why she still does her parents’ taxes (not everyone can afford an accountant).

“Tension brings out a lot of honest conversation. It’s productive,” she said. “I don’t care if some whites don’t choose to spend their leisure time with me. I’m not here to make all white people my friends. But I am here to have a conversation.”

Confronting Diversity

Isabel Cueva, a Mexican American junior who is the first in her family to attend college, said the Occidental experience “pushes people to say, ‘I am an individual.’ Even if you don’t say it to someone else, you think about it.”

Midday in the lobby of a dorm called Haines Hall, freshman Mike Orlando didn’t seem so sure. The 19-year-old from Newport Beach was one of five students who showed up at a forum titled “Is Multiculturalism Being Shoved Down Our Throats?” and he clearly felt the answer was yes.

“I sit and think, there must be something better than this multicultural thing,” the self-described “disgruntled white man” told the group, which sat in a circle. “Maybe it’s because I don’t have a color to identify with, but I don’t feel like I belong to a certain group. Everything is being celebrated except for me.”

But even as Orlando voiced his doubts, what was most striking about the discussion was its civility. Somehow, these students were talking about an issue that still stuns many adults into silence--and they were doing so in a way that was at once frank and polite.

Andre Coleman, a black student, told Orlando he sympathized with his feelings of exclusion.

“Your feeling is real. And I don’t mean to be rude, but you have to deal with it,” he said. “All you’ve seen is your culture and all I’ve seen is your culture. . . . There has to be more of my culture and other people’s cultures. Maybe [that] will help us be more human together.”

Several people thanked Orlando, the only white student who attended, for having the guts to air his views. And at the end of the hour, as everyone ate pizza before going off to class, Orlando said he, too, was glad he’d taken the risk.

“I’m leaving here feeling better,” he said. “I feel a lot less hostile than I did 60 minutes ago.”

Times staff writer Erin Texeira contributed to this article.

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About this Series

In this series, The Times examines affirmative action, a policy that has left its imprint on the workplace and college campuses over the last 30 years. With some now questioning whether giving preferences to minorities has been fair to all, this series, which is appearing periodically throughout 1995, measures its impact on American institutions, ideas and attitudes.

* Previously: Why affirmative action became an issue in 1995, its legal underpinnings, its impact on presidential politics, the difficulties of defining a minority, the views of its beneficiaries, a Times poll showing ambivalent attitudes on the issue, how informal preferences have molded American life, the mind at work in racial stereotyping, the evolution of diversity programs in the workplace, affirmative action in sports and recruiting minorities, the legacy of affirmative action in the workplace, both public and private and public contracting programs.

* SUNDAY: The controversy over college admissions, as universities struggle to find the best way to choose students.

* TODAY: A profile of Occidental College, where diversity brings tensions--and a new way of learning.