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When Shezwae Fleming arrived at the University of Maine last August to assume her role as director of multicultural programs, the snow was gone but all she saw was white.
“You can feel so immersed in this place – so lost without a sense of self,” Fleming said. “You wake up in white and all you see is white and everywhere is white.”
Though she was familiar with predominantly white settings through her last job in minority affairs at the University of Iowa, the state of racial diversity in Orono was startling for her. It was behind the times by 10 to 15 years, she said. Fleming had been faced with difficult projects with ethnic diversity before, but she said coming to Orono’s ALANA Center was like starting from scratch.
“I was coming from a very progressive place. I thought this would be the middle ground,” she said. “It’s not as progressive here as I thought it would be.”
Faced with the task of managing the African, Latino/a, Asian and Native American Center, Fleming, a black woman raised in Detroit, soon realized what seemed to be a very white culture at the University of Iowa was diverse in comparison to Maine.
The University of Maine has reached the midpoint of its two-year Diversity Action Plan crafted by the board of trustees, a plan designed to diversify the composition of UM’s faculty, staff, administration and student body. But opinions about the progress being made toward recruiting and retaining students and staff of color are mixed.
“I think there are two ways of looking at it, and it’s important to look at it through both lenses,” University of Maine President Peter S. Hoff said. “In one lens, we’re way short of where we should be. In the other lens, we’re doing tremendously well.”
Much work remains to be done toward attracting minority students to the campus, but the university as a whole is two to three times more diverse than the rest of the state, Hoff said.
Much of that responsibility of recruitment lies with the University’s admissions office, charged with attracting minority students to UMaine. The process sometimes involves targeting certain ethnic groups, but it does not use a quota system, according to Tammy Light, co-interim director of admissions.
“I think we’re more about opportunity than trying to do quotas,” Light said.
Admissions employees are often forced to travel out of state to reach minority students in areas such as the Bronx, where Operation Breaking Stereotypes, a federally funded program in its second year at UMaine, exposes students from Riverdale-Kingsbridge Academy to the university through an exchange program with Orono and Hampden high schools.
“Sometmes they call it recruitment with a telescopic rifle rather than a shotgun,” John Henry, former director of admissions for UMaine, said about partnering with high schools. “Rather than trying to get some diversity from 100 different high schools in the Northeast, which is hard to do, you focus on one school and make a difference in one school, and then you begin to develop sort of a stream of students who find that they can be successful here and the culture is supportive and they want to be here.”
The admissions office also draws from minority groups in-state, such as the Sudanese population in Portland and the Somalian population in Lewiston, according to Jose Cordero, assistant director of admissions.
“So many of these students just have no idea what’s outside the city limits,” Cordero said.
Minority students are introduced to UMaine every year through the ALANA Center’s Spring Visitation Weekend, when they stay in the residence halls, eat in the commons and are partnered with a current ALANA student. Of the 110 students invited to attend this year’s event, only eight of the students who participated say they plan to attend UMaine, according to Light. While eight sounds like a low number, Light says there is competition among schools to recruit minority students and those eight students will attract others to UMaine.
One dominant minority influence at UMaine already exists within the state, however, represented by the 145 undergraduate Native American students on campus, according to John Bear Mitchell, interim director of the Wabanaki Center. But despite the fact that it’s the largest minority group on campus, double that of the black undergraduate population, he said Native Americans are often ignored in the diversity discussion.
“Just because we have a large pool of Native American students doesn’t mean we’re making a huge effort in recruiting because they’re in our backyard,” Mitchell said. “Having the largest single minority population on campus is not indicative of the recruiting efforts the university puts forth.”
Mitchell, a member of the Penobscot Nation who grew up on Indian Island, oversees the approval of financial aid for Native American students at all seven system campuses. He said he doesn’t have time to actively recruit Native American students.
“We need to have a person that has the time and ability to go out and do that. Admissions doesn’t go out and recruit minorities, nor have they ever offered,” said Mitchell, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UMaine. “Nobody ever recruited me.”
But some students, according to Light, are apprehensive about what they do find at UMaine.
“It’s when they come to campus and see how white this campus really is” that anxieties arise, Light said.
“Students of color,” Fleming said, “might be looking for regional food, or someone who speaks their language, or just little way-of-life things like ‘Where do I get hair products here?’ It becomes quite a problem.”
Some are surprised, said Cordero, that Orono has limited public transportation and one student even expressed fears that bears were roaming the campus. Another student who visited UMaine couldn’t sleep because it was so quiet, Cordero said.
Fleming can connect. When she left her predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit to attend the University of Iowa to study higher education, the number of white faces was so staggering that she boarded a bus home.
“My family told me I had to go back,” she said. “I just had to think, ‘I need to get through this.’”
The culture shock can be startling, but Light says the job of the admissions office is just to get minorities to come to campus. After that, Student Affairs and student groups have to take over to provide support.
Henry, whom Light and Cordero credit with spearheading an innovative approach toward minority recruitment before his departure earlier this semester, says admissions isn’t doing enough. Henry said admissions should help minority students to adjust to life at UMaine, as many leave after their first semester.
“I think it’s an extension of the admissions process,” said Henry. “We sort of do our part, get them here and then we pass the students to Student Life or Student Affairs. I think there’s a role for admissions to continue that follow-up. That first semester’s the most difficult. It’s when you lose students.”
Those students who do stay often find comfort in socializing with members of their own race, highlighting a lack of integration and connection with their white peers, Henry said.
“People need to seek the familiar. You just can’t expect that people are going to naturally go unless you break down the barriers, and the barriers are simply ignorance,” he said.
Marwin Spiller, a professor of sociology, addresses ignorance of racial issues in his race and ethnicity and black studies classes, which always exceed capacity, and warns that integration doesn’t naturally occur in a diverse student body.
“You can place bodies on a campus and that will hopefully create integration, but it seems to be the assessment of the administration that blacks, Latinos and other racial groups don’t want to come to Maine,” Spiller said.
Spiller said the opportunities for minority students at UM are a direct result of racial attitudes on campus.
“We feel comfortable with domestic minorites in positions we expect them to be in, as athletes. We’re not as comfortable with them in the intellectual setting. We look around and you see people of color on this campus and they are either an athlete or a comedian. I think that speaks to the university attitude,” Spiller said.
“If you plant them here, that’s great. But then you need a strucutral support system like the ALANA Center and a supportive administration and faculty of color. You can get a body of students here, but if there’s nothing reflected back at them, you’ve got a problem,” Spiller said.
As it stands, racial diversity within the student body is dominantly reflected in athletic teams, Spiller said.
“I say if you can get a football team that’s half-black and a basketball team that’s half-black … If you can have a racially diverse locker room, why can’t you have a racially diverse classroom? And the answer is: they can if they wanted to. They could. The athletes of color who came here had other options, but there was something said, something done to get them here,” Spiller said.
But Henry says that because of UMaine’s strong Division I athletic program, it’s to be expected that most of the minority student population would be athletes.
“That’s the reality, the nature of the beast. That’s true on all campuses that have mostly white populations,” he said.
Hoff argues that support for student-athletes comes not at the expense of other minority students, but rather complements the effort to create a more diverse campus. In fact, student athletes tend to have higher grade point averages than the rest of the student body, Hoff said, and serve as positive points of reference for prospective students.
“It can only make the campus more inviting,” Hoff said.
Spiller says not only are racial stereotypes driving students away, but the few faculty members of color indicates a hole in the support system necessary to retain minority students.
The hiring process does include policies encouraging diversity among the faculty, but Hoff said while minorities are encouraged to apply, race is not the deciding factor.
“We’re never going to use race as an excuse to hire someone,” he said.
Fleming said having minorities represented among faculty members is crucial to students who seek guidance from educators with similar backgrounds.
“It isn’t mandatory that you have someone that happens to be a minority [on staff], but it is to your benefit. Then you can have frank conversations not driven by an attempt to be bureaucratic,” Fleming said.
But minority faculty members say isolation is an issue for them, as well as for students.
“Perhaps most frustrating,” 2003′s Diversity Action Plan states, “several minority faculty and staff have left the University after only one or two years of employment. Informal conversations and anectotal evidence suggests that feelings of isolation, both on campus and in the wider community, contribute to this decision to leave.”
“[Living in Orono] is isolating at times,” Spiller said. “There are days I want to talk to another faculty member of color but I can’t because it’s not there.”
But the hiring freeze currently in place because of systemwide budget cuts is preventing any faculty, let alone minorities, from being hired.
“Where are we come fall 2004?” Fleming asked. “It’s hard to talk about increasing the number of minority faculty and staff when you’re frozen.”
Without minority faculty to put a face on multicultural issues, students graduate without a full understanding of the world they’re about to enter, Henry said.
“It would be wrong to send our Maine graduates out into the world not being prepared to operate in the world. That would be just criminal, I think,” he said.
Fleming, in trying to encourage dialogue between departments, said she continues to hit roadblocks despite the university’s official intention to promote diversity.
“Not everyone has been open about it. It’s startling. It’s frustrating,” Fleming said. “My job and everyone’s job is just to keep the conversation going.”
Matt Shaer contributed to this report.
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