DEALING WITH MERITOCRACY IN DEMOCRACY
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to each other as
if
race is the most important or only thing that distinguish–
es us.
We need to encourage trustee boards to butt into campus quality-if-life issues.
Trustees can and should evaluate the university president on the basis of
his/her institution's success with fostering and achieving racial integration,
and with actually eliminating racially isolated facilities.
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need to work to replicate on more campuses groups like Jerry Martin
~
National Alumni Forum.
In this connection, we need to seek foundation
grants to resource and support campus-based groups who organize alumni
on behalf of the great books, a core curriculum, and in opposition to
racialism and ethnocentrism. We must spot and correct such "isms" as
racism, sexism, and paternalism as antithetical to free inquiry, and to the
purposes of the academy.
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need to bring to the campus a new Civil Rights movement-and
identi–
fy
and support activists who take personal and meaningful steps on campus
to foster racial interaction-and when they leave campus, in making inte–
grated housing choices. As Kurt Scholz said yesterday, "College presidents
and college leaders should encourage their students to practice the art of
peaceably living together."
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need a MacArthur-type foundation to identify and financially support those
geniuses on and
cff
campus who are working diligently and courageously to tear down
the racial walls in society--those
who, when they make choices in their living
arrangements, move into areas where their racial group is underrepresented.
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need a central clearinghouse operation,
equipped with modern-age
technology, to moni tor ei ther segregative or integrative activi ties and
efforts on the campuses where we have leaders "reporting in."
All college bulletins/catalogues and student handbooks will need to be revised
so as not to stereotype, stigmatize, categorize, or focus on the racial identi–
ty of student groups, or reference racial support or counseling services.
Hiring should be diverse, not ghettoized.
Window-dressing and token–
quota hiring should be ruled out in policy statements
and
practice; and all
employment patterns should be assessed in accordance with validated job
descriptions, extensive outreach, and core qualifications. The Joint Center
finally got it right, in advising, "What is needed is for blacks to be con–
vinced that they are being invited to the faculty because of their
scholarship...and not in the first instance to teach African or African–
American studies." Also, minority faculty-"particularly those on tenure
track-should not be presumed to take on special loads simply because they
are black...." .
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need a renewed emphasis on integration in grades K-12.
In this connection,
we need more advocates for integration-for integration's sake. On the factu–
al side, as Theodore Cross indicates,
"Whi
tes predominantly go to the
