UW diversity plan at age 10

By DEBORAH ZIFF Lee Newspapers
Published - Sunday, August 24, 2008

It's been 10 years since the UW System launched its major diversity initiative -- Plan 2008 -- and in that time administrators have successfully recruited hundreds of students of color and faculty to come to UW-Madison.In that same 10 years, UW-Madison has made news for photoshopping a photo of a black student into a crowd of white students on a brochure and for a law school professor's remarks about the Hmong that some considered racist.Now in the plan's final year, the numbers of minorities at the state's flagship have been stubbornly budging upward, but students and administrators say there is still more work to be done, especially when it comes to creating a welcoming campus environment for people of color."I think there's room for improvement everywhere," said incoming chancellor Biddy Martin. "We're probably going to have to, as most universities are, get much more aggressive in some of our efforts."It's difficult to declare the program a success or failure because its goals lacked specificity.In part paralyzed by legal restrictions, the only numeric goal was that the diversity of the freshman class match the diversity of the state's high school graduates. That benchmark was met in the first year of the program, 1998, and in every subsequent year.Bernice Durand, the former head of diversity programs on campus, said she is looking for the day when students of color are getting admitted, performing and graduating at the same rate as white students."When students of color are doing as well as white students, you'll feel like you've got equal opportunity," she said. "No, we're not there."There were seven goals to the plan when it was hatched 10 years ago, and with the more tangible of those goals, the results are mixed:The percentage of black, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic students has increased in the past 10 years, but it is still a small part of the undergraduate student population at UW-Madison, just 12 percent of almost 30,000 students. That's up from around 9 percent in 1998.A profile of the incoming freshman class will not be available until Sept. 1, but preliminary numbers suggest the percent of minorities will be similar to last year, Farrell said.The minority graduation rate is inching up, but it's still not as strong as the graduation rate for white students. For the freshman class of 2001, 59.3 percent of minorities had graduated by six years, compared to 80.1 percent for the total class.The number of faculty and staff of color has also increased. The numbers of black, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic faculty have increased from about 10 percent to 16 percent, but the number of academic staff hovers around 11 percent. [To see the entire story, go to: http://www.couleenews.com/articles/2008/08/24/thisjustin/06uwdiversity.txt ]