Research institutions are the primary producers of the nation’s
scientific brain trust. Yet, the record of these institutions for
producing African Americans in these disciplines is spotty. In this
feature, Black Issues examines the experiences of three of the leading
science and engineering institutions, citing examples of strategies
that are yielding favorable results and those that leave senior
scholars scratching their heads over why they’re not working.
In any given academic year, Roland Allen’s travel schedule can take
him as far north as Alaska and as far south as the Virgin Islands. As
the director of minority recruitment and admissions at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he admits that this year
the affirmative action backlash that is sweeping the country is making
his job a little tougher. But not for the reasons you might think.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, institute is a private research
university in a state that, so far, has not experienced any legislative
or judicial effort to limit affirmative action. So Allen’s challenges
are not like those facing his colleagues in California or Texas, where
affirmative action has been severely curtailed. Allen’s problems are
more a matter of perception.
“Even good people sometimes are anti-affirmative action,” Allen
says, seated in his spacious office on the first floor of MIT’s main
administration building. The orderly workspace complements the
recruiter’s neat, preppie persona. “It is a struggle for some people to
support what we’re doing here,” he adds with a countenance of angst.
Allen, who is African American and has been in the college
recruitment business for nearly two decades, has observed in the past
year that an increasing number of African American and Latino students
don’t want to be admitted through affirmative action.
“It is becoming harder and harder to do minority events,” Allen
says. “People will sometimes angrily reply [to invitations], saying,
`You’ve admitted me and now you’re telling me I’m in a special
category.’…
“[Yet], we [at the institute] feel there are particular minority
issues that are concerns of most parents and minority students about
support services, social and cultural groups on campus,” he continues,
“and we want to address those.”
