John Brooks Slaughter: On achieving excellence and equity

The offer to accept the Occidental College presidency in 1988 was both intriguing and compelling.

For some time, the college's faculty leadership, as well as key trustees, had been envisioning a future for the institution in which it would possess a student population that more closely reflected the changing demographics of Los Angeles and in which the college would have strengthened linkages with the city it calls home. Their wish was to attract a president who could embrace those aims. I was being given the opportunity of a lifetime to lead an institution toward the achievement of its highest ambitions.

I felt that the aspirations of the college were appropriate and achievable, but that very little consideration had been given to the costs and hard work that would be required if they were to be attained.

Potential costs were not only those that could be measured in dollars. I anticipated that there could be costs associated with dealing with alumni perceptions of institutional quality as graduates watched the college change from what it looked like during their "halcyon" days on campus.

We had to be mindful, also, of some emerging, negative societal attitudes about the demographic metamorphosis occurring in Los Angeles, and of long-held feelings in the academy about what constitutes the "best and the brightest," particularly as those descriptions apply to students and faculty. In addition, I was struck by the sense that the college, to a large extent, had withdrawn from the communities that surround it and tended to downplay and even apologize for its urban location within the city limits of Los Angeles. My first major leadership challenge was to assist the campus in developing a fuller understanding of these realities.

Pursuit of the first goal, building a diverse student population, was already well underway. Achieving student diversity, broadly defined, is a worthwhile educational objective for any college or university.

But diversity, in my opinion, is only a stepping stone toward the more meaningful goal of equity-equity of access, opportunity, and institutional treatment. A commitment to student diversity alone falls short of the mark in a college or university if a similar commitment does not exist to achieve diversity in the faculty, administration, and governing board, as well as in curricular offerings and support programs.

Very early in my presidency, I asked the Board of Trustees to authorize the initiation of a strategic planning process. It would have as its purpose the creation of a shared vision that would serve as a beacon to guide the college into the 21st century.

The strategic plan, "Of Excellence and Equity," converted the vision statement I had fashioned from the hopes and dreams conveyed to me during the selection process into a concrete set of action plans and objectives that would come to define Occidental's "Journey to 2000." Most significant was the creation and adoption of "The Mission," a statement of purpose that has been embraced by our campus community with as much unanimity as can be achieved in the often fractious environment of the academy. It called for the creation of a learning community founded on the synergistic inseparability of excellence and equity.

Today, it is evident that because of the leadership and support of a remarkable chain of Board of Trustees chairs and Faculty Council presidents, and with the commitment of the vast majority of students, faculty, administrators, trustees, and alumni, Occidental College has been successful in achieving the aims set forth in writing a decade ago. Upon reflection, I feel confident that organizing, leading, and completing the strategic planning effort were the most important things I have done to build a sense of community among the various constituencies of the college.

The most recent edition of US. News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges and Universities" reported that Occidental is number one among all liberal arts colleges with respect to student diversity. As pleased as we are for that recognition, we are more gratified by the fact that an already fine faculty has become even better as a result of our successful efforts over the last nine years to aggressively recruit and attract a diverse group of outstanding additions to its membership. With the leadership of our dean of faculty, more than one-half of the new faculty appointees have been women and fully one-half are from racial minority groups. In this regard, we are quite different today from the institution I found when

I was being interviewed. (I recall, at that time, questioning an African-American professor on the search committee about the number of black faculty members at Occidental. Her trenchant response was, "You're looking at 50 percent of them.") And although the changes have not been as momentous, our governing board has diversified itself as well.

Importantly, the college has successfully repudiated the fears that the changes that have occurred would be accompanied by declining quality. The productivity of our faculty, the successes of our students in national competitions (three Rhodes Scholars over the last nine years), the above-goal completion of a comprehensive campaign, and near-record giving by alumni are all meaningful measures of the appropriateness of the college's mission. Nearly one-half of our students are participants in the more than 20 volunteer and community service programs we conduct in Los Angeles and surrounding communities, and the vast and exciting metropolitan area has become a vibrant social, cultural, political, and scientific laboratory for our students and faculty.

I am indeed fortunate to have had the opportunity to play a leading role in bringing about these dynamic changes.

JOHN BROOKS SLAUGHTER is president of Occidental College.

Copyright American Council on Education Spring 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved