An often-expressed apprehension within the Black community is that traditionally White institutions were never really committed to integration, diversity, or affirmative action. The fear was that many of these colleges undertook halfhearted minority student recruitment and retention efforts and occasional Black faculty/staff appointments while waiting for relief from conservative courts, legislatures and voters.
Given the recent legal legislative and political environment, that relief seems to have arrived.
Colleges can achieve their goals if real commitment exists - as seen by the fact that it is common for colleges to surpass multi-million dollar fundraising campaigns.
The issue of whether there ever was real commitment for access and equity, however, remains. And, of course, there are many opportunities to demonstrate and prove it.
What follows is a small representative sample of actions and activities that transcend rhetorical commitment. This sample is by no means definitive or exhaustive, but it shows that there remains individual and institutional commitment that has weathered the current storm. We will all find out in the next few years if this commitment will reverse, or move forward.
Engineering Diversity
African American and Hispanic students can be hard to find in engineering and the hard sciences, particularly at the graduate level. That is one reason why Georgia Institute of Technology stands out.
Georgia Tech confers more graduate degrees in engineering on African American students than any other institution, and is second only to Stanford in conferring master's degrees on Hispanic students. Only historically Black colleges confer more bachelor's degrees in engineering and computer sciences on African Americans than Georgia Tech. (Those HBCUs are: North Carolina A&T, Florida A&M, Prairie View A&M, Tuskegee and Southern Universities.)
And Georgia Tech has done a great deal to bring women into the traditionally male field of engineering as well, conferring more engineering degrees on women than any other institution.
