Supply and demands

The UMaine students who took to the streets Tuesday morning for a protest march demanding greater diversity on the Orono campus have an unassailably good cause. It’s their timing that’s questionable.

With only 346 minority students in a student body of 9,213, UMO is pretty darned monochromatic. But that 3.7 percent is just about double the statewide percentage of minorities. According to the 1990 census, Maine has a total population of 1.22 million, of which 1.20 million are white.

Certainly, any university campus should be, to fully deserve the designation, a microcosm of the wider world. But for UMaine to obtain the necessary supply of black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian students, it must reach out beyond the state border. Unfortunately, the way the protesters made their demands, by questioning the sincerity of UMaine President Peter Hoff, may be counterproductive to that worthwhile goal.

Hoff is new on the job. He came to UMaine last fall from the University of California system and brought with him substantial credentials as a searcher for equal opportunity and diversity. And he wasted no time in putting them to use. He is the first UMaine president to officially recognize Martin Luther King Day. And it was just two months ago that he released BearWorks, a plan to redefine the campus’s mission that includes an extensive proposal to increase diversity within the student body, faculty and staff.

That plan includes a commitment to create a university with an ethnic and cultural population profile that exceeds the profile not just of Maine, but of northern New England. It doubles the size of UMaine’s Opportunity Hire Fund to recruit and retain minority faculty. It calls for the development of support programs for minorities. Further, Hoff vowed to strengthen Office of Equal Opportunity, he has offered five tenure-track positions to minorities, he has established two professorships in diversity and he has required the implementation next fall of recommendations in the ALANA plan.

ALANA is the African, Latino, Asian and Native American student organization, the same organization that led the protest Tuesday. Their demands could well have been lifted directly from pages 17 and 18 of BearWorks. ALANA and Hoff, in effect, are on the same page (or pages) but ALANA didn’t seem to realize it.

One of ALANA’s primary grievances is this: The new director of the Office of Equal Opportunity was selected from within the university staff, beating out several out-of-state minority candidates with real experience in recruiting minority students. While promoting from within generally is a good policy, ALANA says promoting from within a system that has failed is a poor choice when proven success is available. It’s a point UMaine would do well to remember in future appointments.

If UMaine is to become a more diverse place to get an education, its recruitment must not end at Kittery or Fort Kent. A black college-bound high schooler in, say, New York, needs to be getting the message that he or she is welcome and wanted at UMaine, not that UMaine is hostile. Hoff is trying to send the right message. While missteps are fair game for criticism, ALANA must be careful not to drown it out.