By Michael P. Riccards

At the too-tender age of 32, I was chosen the first dean of a unified arts and sciences faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. It was then the largest liberal arts faculty in New England. One of the first challenges was the lack of diversity in that faculty. The college was pledged to affirmative action, but the faculty was basically white and middle class, often Harvard educated. The faculty liked to call itself the “Harvard of the Poor.”

One of the first challenges was the absence of minority faculty in a collection of liberal scholars. The first semester I got all sorts of pledges to do comprehensive searches in order to change the profile. A not-too-sophisticated dean let the chairmen handle the recruitment, and lo and behold, at the end of the recruitment season, the results were predictable — more white women and men usually from the Ivy League. 

The second year, I was smarter, I informed the chairs that I was withholding five positions to achieve the important objective of a heterogenous faculty. The chairman of the English department, who on the side like to socialize with faculty at Wellesley, saw me and insisted that he had a large number of openings and that he and the faculty in his department could not really find minority faculty “for they weren’t really ready” for university positions. Perhaps, he declared, “minority scholars would be ready in a generation two.” 

I promptly responded, “I don’t expect to be here a generation or so, see my successors” He went back to the department of 50 full-time colleagues, and they found three Black scholars, two of whom had national reputations.  The more astute philosophy chair found a Black philosopher in a discipline that never produced other than cranky old white guys.

The word got out the third year: This guy is serious.

As I watch the Trump administration, it is obvious what is happening. It is a wholesale attack on Blacks and on any sort of comprehensive attempt to provide a diverse treatment of minorities. We forget that  Vice President Vance is really an affirmative action baby. So was the Obama couple, Trump got into UPenn because  of pappy’s money that allowed him to leave Fordham in the Bronx. Justice Alito came from a school teacher family and overcame anti -Italian prejudice to go to Princeton.  

The campus chancellor and the president of U Mass met and concluded that the dean might get in trouble, but then they would wait and see. Campus leadership has always been weak.

A few years ago, I went back and saw the demographic changes — minority students, mixed faculty and students being able to take doctoral programs, and Boston is a very different and expensive city.   

During a long career in higher education, Michael P. Riccards served as president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, Shepherd College (now Shepherd University) in West Virginia, and Fitchburg State College (now Fitchburg State University) in Massachusetts.

Categories: Jandoli Institute, Michael Riccards, Politics