Welcome to Multicultural U.
When John Brooks Slaughter arrives at work at Occidental College, as he has each day for the last 11 years, he watches students dressed in grunge slouch by on their way to class, some shouting, others laughing, their heads bent close in conversation. It is an utterly ordinary scene, except that the faces--black, white, brown, tan, yellow--could fill a Benetton ad. And Occidental President John Slaughter is the casting agent.
As a child in 1940s Kansas, Slaughter was schooled within a system so rigidly divided by race that it became a national symbol of injustice. Just a few years after he graduated from Topeka High, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka that school segregation is unconstitutional. Those ugly years of separation molded Slaughter, now 65, into one of the country’s most passionate advocates of equal opportunity in education. Through a varied career that’s included jobs with the U.S. Navy, the National Science Foundation and the University of Maryland at College Park, he has tirelessly voiced one theme: A college education is the road to fulfillment and success. Those who don’t fit the traditional image of student--those who are poor, minority, full-time workers or older than 21--not only must be given access, but can be without compromising scholastic standards.
“People in our society find it difficult to believe that excellence can coexist with equity,” he says. “I reject that notion.”
This belief has produced startling results at Occidental, a small liberal arts college in Eagle Rock. Under Slaughter’s administration, the onetime nearly all-white institution recast itself as a school that U.S. News & World Report has labeled the nation’s “most diverse.” Forty-three percent of its 1,550 students are Asian, Latino or African American. And more than half the faculty hired in the past decade are women and/or people of color.
Last June, Slaughter announced his retirement to take effect this June 30. On campus, the announcement was followed by rumors: Because Occidental’s governing board of trustees could have extended his tenure but didn’t, the president was, in essence, forced out, and that he was furious. He vehemently denies this, and no one else is talking for the record.
But the persistence of the gossip underscores the controversy that has risen from John Slaughter’s transformation of Occidental College. Is it merely an idealistic and overly expensive experiment? Or is it a glimpse of L.A.’s future?
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Come to Occidental on a sunny day and chances are good that you’ll find John Slaughter sitting outside his office in shirtsleeves, smoking a cigar and chatting with a student. Around them, the campus gleams, a gorgeous 120 acres of Italian/Mediterranean-style buildings, oaks, eucalyptus and flowering trees. Slaughter’s pride is obvious as he gives a tour, pointing out an airy, high-ceilinged new student center and a lounge area decorated with Mission-style furniture. “Hey, how’re ya doing?” he greets everyone he sees, and students,
faculty and administrative workers all respond with genuine warmth.
There’s something immediately likable about Slaughter, a mellow-voiced man with a receding hairline, bifocals and thick brows. He seems avuncular, calm, soothing. Even when he’s searching for an answer, he doesn’t move or fidget. He has a puckish smile that he flashes a lot.
The school’s commitment to what its “mission statement” calls education with “a distinctive interdisciplinary and multicultural focus” is evident everywhere, in programs and policies that would give conservatives nightmares. Through the spring, campus placards announce observance of Black History Month; Semana de la Raza; a celebration of women’s “herstory”; and tributes to Armenian and Asian American heritage. Each year, student leaders go to Palm Springs for a retreat that includes “diversity training,” and political correctness abounds: In a recent letter to the editor of the student newspaper, one man identified himself, without irony, as “a conscious, proud, white, male, heterosexual, owning-class, able-bodied individual.”
But to laugh at this excess is to miss the fact that something intriguing is happening at Occidental. Diversity may be the rule in a magnet school or Cal State classroom, but that’s not the case at higher-echelon colleges that produce America’s upper-middle classes. Here, however, where a disproportionately high number of graduates get PhDs, a sociology course may be taught by an assistant professor whose parents are working-class Mexican immigrants to students who include the scion of a wealthy Eastern family; a first-generation college kid, whose father’s yearly income is less than Occidental’s $21,000 tuition; and an extremely bright inner-city valedictorian who arrived not knowing how to write a term paper. This mix hasn’t produced paradise; in recent years several interracial fights and outbreaks of racist graffiti have occurred, and some white students complain that “if you say anything against multiculturalism you’re seen as a racist.” But most students I talked to say they are glad to be there. “To be honest, before I came here, I was afraid of white males,” says Sandra Gallardo, a 20-year-old senior. “And now there are several who are my friends. I learned that I can trust.”
Iasha Warfield, 21, grew up in the Moreno Valley, and “in theory, my high school was ‘diverse.’ But I was the only black woman in my honors class, the only black woman in the gifted program. I never even met the black teachers because they were teaching remedial classes. I’d never met a black professional until I came to Occidental.”
Moreover, against the common argument that high minority enrollment invariably equals low academic standards, U.S. News & World Report rates Occidental among the nation’s Top 40 liberal arts colleges. It has a 78% six-year graduation rate, roughly equal to that of UCLA’s. And in the past decade, 10 of its students have been chosen as Rhodes, Marshall or Truman scholarship winners, an impressive number for such a small school.
A reaccredidation committee for the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges was “genuinely impressed” when it visited the school in February, says Ronald Thomas, chief of staff for Trinity College President Evan Dobelle, the committee’s chair. “They have done what many small private institutions have tried to do and failed, or to which they’ve simply paid lip service. The team thought it [the combination of strong academics and strong diversity] was a remarkable success.”
This success is generally credited to Slaughter, an engineer by training who didn’t even enter the academic world full time until he was 41. The move toward diversification was by no means his idea; it began in the 1960s, when the college obtained sizable scholarship grants specifically targeting minority students. In 1978, the faculty voted a two-course “non-Western civilization” requirement for graduation. In 1987, it started a free six-week program designed to keep minority students by helping them adjust to college life, and opened a “multicultural” residence hall. “By then we saw the demographic changes coming in Los Angeles,” says Eric Newhall, professor of American studies and English (and an Occidental alumnus). “Put simplistically, the argument was, rather than acknowledge these changes when we’re forced to do so, why not plan for them?”
But it was Slaughter who turned what had been a well-meaning but not terribly coherent effort into the heart of the school’s identity. Within 18 months of his appointment, the school had written its “mission statement,” which declared that an outstanding college was one that combined academic excellence with ethnic, racial, religious and gender equity, creation of “community,” and civic service.
Slaughter considers this statement one of his major accomplishments (“I wanted something that defined what we stood for”), and, indeed, it became the core around which the school mobilized. Recruiters began targeting high-achieving minority students. Admissions officers reduced reliance on SAT scores (Slaughter dismisses them as “as good as a coin flip” in determining a student’s college success) and increased emphasis on high school performance, essay writing and strong letters of recommendation. Professors began experimenting with different ways of teaching, such as lecturing less and stressing “active learning” techniques. Faculty research committees aggressively sought out women and minority candidates. The latter effort, adds Slaughter, was absolutely crucial to the plan.
“Mere diversity is not an end in itself,” he says. “Plantation life in the South was diverse. A penitentiary is diverse. But what’s the distribution of responsibility? At a university, is it likely that a person of color is teaching class or administering a major unit in the administration? That’s what defines that school’s commitment to equity.” (For similar reasons, Occidental has no separate Chicano or black studies departments. To Slaughter, “these programs always appear as appendages rather than central parts of the institution.”)
Finally, in what some considered a long-overdue effort to connect Occidental to the city surrounding it, Slaughter introduced himself to then-Mayor Tom Bradley. The two became good friends, and Bradley later appointed Slaughter to the Christopher Commission, which recommended changes in the LAPD after the 1992 civil unrest. The need to “give back” to the community became another Occidental mantra, and today nearly half its student body participates in various forms of volunteer work.
Occidental’s turnover came during the very years when anti-affirmative action sentiment and concerns about multiculturalism were growing nationwide. In 1995, the UC Regents voted to prohibit the use of race and ethnicity in system-wide admission; in 1996, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Texas case that racial considerations in law school admissions were unconstitutional; and California voters passed Proposition 209.
But Slaughter managed to create a remarkably wide base of support for “the mission.” That’s partly because Occidental’s multiculturalism is not the cliched variety, despite lapses into touchy-feeliness and jargon. The taboo word “class” is mentioned nearly as much as race, and seven years ago, Slaughter says, financial aid policies were altered so that decisions were based on economic need rather than ethnicity.
“My argument was that if we’re serious in our claims that we value excellence and equity, we’re going to eliminate any distinctions,” he says. Slaughter also emphasizes that “diversity” includes white men. “If you make someone feel he’s being excluded and others are benefiting at his expense, of course he’ll rise up and react. And in my opinion, that’s dumb.” When a student gave an anti-white speech at a rally just after the 1992 civil unrest, Slaughter responded with a warning to the campus that “I will not tolerate such behavior.”
A large measure of Slaughter’s success also came by dint of his own personality. Faculty members describe him as a “consensus builder” and praise his “democratic leadership.” (When he arrived, for instance, he thrilled professors by letting them run their own staff meetings.) What professor of politics Roger Boesche calls “his ability to love and be friends unequivocally” also inspires great loyalty. Robert C. Maxson, president of Cal State Long Beach, points to the time when he was suffering a professional crisis as head of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Slaughter showed up unannounced at his office one afternoon just to offer support. Students responded enthusiastically to Slaughter’s practice of inviting all incoming students into his office for a personal hello and an invitation to come back to talk whenever they liked.
“At my old school,” says Deborah Thompson, 22, a transfer student from Bates College in Maine, “I didn’t even know who the president was.”
But Slaughter is far more complicated and contradictory than such praise might suggest. He’s radical enough to suggest, as he did at a 1993 meeting with a business group, that high-income families be charged more to attend UC schools, yet he’s a strong advocate of the kind of classical education that includes Plato, art and music. He’s an idealist who believes university leaders should assume the lofty position of being “moral and intellectual voices for what we should know is right in our society,” and he’s an ambitious, wealthy man who lives in Pasadena, drives a black Mercedes and sits on the boards of directors of firms such as Arco, Avery Dennison, IBM, Solutia and Northrop Grumman. He is someone who spends his work hours immersed in 21st century issues but spends his leisure time laying track for a small-gauge model railroad re-creation of the Topeka, Kan., he knew when he was 10.
He never forgets his race: “When I get up in the morning,” he says evenly, “the first thing I realize is that I’m a black man.” Yet he takes great offense at being defined by it: Last year, when The Times announced his retirement, describing him as “one of the most prominent African American leaders in higher education,” he immediately phoned the paper. “I said when [UCLA Chancellor] Chuck Young retired, did you call him ‘one of the country’s foremost white presidents’?” He never shows anger in public but is driven by the moral outrage of someone who knows what it’s like to be considered second class.
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John Slaughter was born in 1934. his father was a coal miner, onetime Baptist preacher and apartment building janitor who left school after the third grade. As an adolescent, Slaughter became a voracious reader of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and fell in love with the idea of building things, but when he told teachers he wanted to be an engineer, he was politely steered toward a vocational course in radio repair.
He made it to Kansas State University--because he hadn’t taken the right prep courses in high school, it took him five years to graduate--then to graduate school at UCLA and UC San Diego. Almost always the only African American in his engineering classes, he faced the routine humiliations of being black in a white era: He and his college roommate were refused service at a Kansas restaurant; he never knew whether he’d be relegated to the upper balcony when he went to the movies; in 1960, when he and his wife, Bernice, tried to buy a house in San Diego, they were refused showings in many neighborhoods.
He responded with determination “to be as successful as I could” and to bring others along with him. During the 1960s and ‘70s, he was on the board of the San Diego Urban League youth training program, headed a committee on minorities for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and spoke in inner-city high schools, urging kids to consider engineering careers. By the time he was hired by the University of Washington to run its Applied Physics Laboratory in 1975, “I had come to the conclusion that I enjoyed working with people more than things. I also found I loved the feeling of being on a college campus. And I concluded that if I was going to be on one, I might as well run it.”
Two years later, then-President Jimmy Carter appointed Slaughter assistant director for astronomical, atmospheric, earth and ocean sciences at the National Science Foundation, and he, Bernice and the children, John Jr. (a vice president for a Baltimore financial securities firm) and daughter, Jacqueline (associate director of the Mesa Engineering Program at Cal State L.A.), moved to Washington, D.C. He left in 1979 to become academic vice president and provost at Washington State University. The following year, Carter called again, and Slaughter became the National Science Foundation’s first African American director.
The high that came with such a career pinnacle was brief. A few months later, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter, and subsequent budget cuts ended the kind of educational programs Slaughter felt should be a foundation priority. After two years he left in frustration to become chancellor of the University of Maryland at College Park, a Southern school, he notes, that he couldn’t have attended when he was of college age, and whose traditions still included a football halftime ritual of having a student run across the field carrying the Confederate flag. “One of the first things I did,” he says wryly, “was put an end to that.”
Slaughter was hired to improve Maryland’s academic ranking, but increasing minority representation on campus was also high on his agenda.
“The chair of the board of regents asked, ‘How do you plan to do this?’ ” he recalls with obvious pleasure. “I said, ‘I’ll get some buses, drive them to D.C., load them up with students and bring them back for a picnic so they can see they’re welcome here.’ And that’s just what happened.”
Not quite. But “through talent and likability, John was able to make us understand the dual goals of excellence and equity, and how compatible and important they were,” says William E. Kirwan, who served as provost under Slaughter, succeeded him as president, and is now president of Ohio State University. “The real leap forward at Maryland happened after he left, but his fingerprints were all over it. The percentage of African Americans increased by 50 to 70%. The school also improved academically; its college of engineering is now ranked 13th in the country, and it was in the 30s when John arrived.”
Slaughter’s progress at Maryland was halted in the spring of 1986, after 22-year-old Len Bias, the school’s star basketball player and a recent Boston Celtics draft pick, died of a cocaine overdose. When it was revealed that, among other things, Bias had either withdrawn from or was failing all his classes and that the basketball team’s combined GPA was around 1.8, Slaughter said publicly the university had failed its athletes, and he fired popular coach Lefty Driesell. Slaughter dealt with reporters nonstop in the months that followed Bias’ death, and my asking about it now seems to make him a bit weary. “Lenny,” he pauses, and when he starts again, his voice is very quiet, “was a marvelous young man, whom I cared about immensely. His death was a tragedy that, to this day, I would reverse if I could.”
After Bias, Slaughter says he lost all faith in collegiate athletic programs as steppingstones for minority students. “College sports,” he says with pained resignation, “is just a business. And it’s getting worse.”
But the Bias crisis strengthened him as an administrator. “I learned that I could take punishment. I learned that I could take responsibility for things that were my responsibility.” Though he doesn’t stress it, the time also served to remind him of those things that hadn’t changed since his youth in Topeka. After he hired an African American high school coach to replace Driesell, who is white, Maryland basketball fans erupted in anger, and vicious letters that made copious use of the N-word poured into Slaughter’s office. Ask how that felt, and his face freezes. There’s a flicker of bleakness in his eyes. Then he laughs it off (“It’s not something you hope will happen to you”), and the moment passes. He left for Occidental in the fall of 1988, but he still wears a ruby University of Maryland ring.
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Everyone seems to like John Slaughter, but not everyone likes what he’s done at Occidental. No one is willing to speak publicly of dissatisfaction. But there is no question that, especially at first, the rapidity of the school’s demographic make-over troubled some members of the then mostly white male board of trustees. “Many were alumni who graduated in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” says Los Angeles businessman Stephen Hinchliffe, a longtime board member and former chair who is white. “They remembered Occidental when it was monochromatic. You’d have to be a hermit to think there wouldn’t be concern.”
“A speech given by a trustee five years ago said, in essence, ‘We’re headed in the wrong direction; we’ll end up with no white males here!’ ” recalls a faculty member who attended trustee meetings at the time. In addition, a number of alumni not on the board have consistently expressed displeasure with what they believe to be the sacrifice of academic standards and “traditional values” to meet racial goals. Ironically, a change that aroused the most rage, the removal of the campus chapel’s cross, had been approved by Slaughter’s predecesor.
Some of Slaughter’s most ardent supporters on the faculty have other criticisms. With a few exceptions, they say, he didn’t hire strong seconds-in-command and was too slow to fire those who proved incompetent. Some also fault his fund-raising, particularly given his corporate connections, a failing Slaughter acknowledges. Finally, and most significantly, there’s the problem of money: Occidental has reeled from one financial mess to another in recent years. “There was no explosion,” says one professor, “just a steady grind of bad news.”
The situation is not entirely Slaughter’s making: Even before he arrived, a huge financial aid budget was straining resources. The percentage of Occidental’s total expenditures that goes to scholarships is about 10% higher than that at comparable schools. (Last year more than 70% of students received help, with the average grant around $19,000.) With a sizable portion of the school’s investment portfolio in real estate, Occidental was hit hard by the Southern California recession of the early ‘90s. And, say several faculty and staff members, long-established bookkeeping practices were an outright disaster when he arrived.
Nevertheless, say some critics, when it came to money Slaughter could not seem to gain control.
“He’d present what was happening as a short-term problem,” says a faculty member. “But then every few months there would be another ‘unexpected’ million-dollar deficit, and another and another. Staff couldn’t be hired, raises weren’t given, and the faculty got the feeling they couldn’t predict their own futures. He eroded people’s confidence in his ability to manage.”
Slaughter says mildly: “I’m not trying to shift blame, but the fact is the precise nature of the college’s fiscal picture was not known when I came. There were some issues that we later learned had been present for at least 20 years. They had not been uncovered by auditors in the past, and uncovering them has been a full-scale effort. Often people in higher education want quick and easy solutions. There aren’t many of those around. However, we are confident now that all has been resolved and the plan that’s been developed for the college’s future is a sound one.”
Whatever Slaughter’s shortcomings, most believe he’s changed Occidental forever, and many feel it’s for the better. And the strongest argument for Occidental’s course of action is rooted in practicality: It says that a racially and ethnically diverse community must train an equally diverse professional and political class to represent it. “I’m convinced,” says trustee Hinchliffe, “that we’re educating future major players in this city’s establishment.”
“You can’t talk about the global village, then resist teaching people to work together,” adds professor Newhall. “What we’re doing is tremendously complicated. But I believe that 20 years from now, most schools in America will be forced to make similar changes, because if they don’t, intelligent 18-year-olds will have nothing to do with them.”
On March 11, Occidental trustees announced they had selected a new president, Theodore R. Mitchell, a former UCLA vice chancellor--and a white man. The campus took the news with remarkable calm. “There’s no going back,” says American studies professor Arthe Anthony. “The mission is not any one person.”
Slaughter has accepted an endowed professorship in leadership in education at USC, starting Aug. 1. “I’m very pleased with the experience I’ve had here,” he says. “The commitment was to build a microcosm of a society where people were measured on their merits, and not judged on whether they were African American, Latino, female, disabled, gay--any of those things that traditionally separate us from each other. Do I feel we perfected that? No.” He smiles. “But I think we’ve proved that it’s possible.”
