In 1964, then University-president Robert Goheen '40 made an historical appointment.
Carl Fields, for whom the Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding is named, was appointed assistant dean of the college. He was the first African-American to hold such a high post at an Ivy League school.
In the 40 years since, the University has made great strides in increasing the number of minorities in the student body and on the faculty.
But today, only one senior administrator, defined as a vice president or senior dean, out of 18 is a minority: Vice President for Campus Life Janet Dickerson.
That figure puts Princeton slightly behind the average of similar institutions which responded to queries by The Daily Princetonian.
The University of Pennsylvania, Duke and Georgetown each has a higher percentage of minorities in the administration, while Yale and Harvard have smaller percentages.
Senior and non-senior administration officials at Princeton in recent interviews with the 'Prince' assert that it is important for the University to recruit administrators from minority backgrounds. They say the University is trying hard to bring more minority administrators in by expanding the scope of administration searches.
Dickerson says: "Our administration should be a reflection of the community we have."
President Tilghman offered further explanation. "An administration that is broadly representative is more likely to understand and respond effectively to a student body that is as diverse as our own," she says.
"While I stand by the primary importance of hiring the best candidate, one can increase the likelihood that this will be a minority candidate by working more effectively to broaden the applicant pool itself."
A high-level Princeton official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says the Tilghman administration, as well as the University's board of trustees, wants to address the number of minorities in high-level positions.
"The administration as well as the trustees see it as an issue that needs to be addressed," the official says.
But "this is the sort of thing that takes a lot of time," the official adds.
The trustees are significantly more diverse than the administration, with eight of 45 members being African-American and one Asian-American.
From the student side, the president of the Black Student Union called on the administration to resolve the paradox between a commitment to diversity and having few minority administrators.
"If you have an administration that claims to care about diversity," says BSU president Leslie-Bernard Joseph '06, "it's interesting when the administration is not so diverse."
USG president Matt Margolin '05 says he plans to research ways to attract minority faculty to give talks at the University as well as consider staying at Princeton for a term as a visiting professor.
Different approaches
A different high-level Princeton administration official says that in trying to attract qualified minority candidates to senior positions, "there's a way to be proactive and there's a way to be reactive."
If, during the process of a high-level search, Tilghman "waits to see who's interested, she may only get one kind of applicant," the official says. But "if she's on the phone, calling people," the result may be a broader applicant pool — one that includes minorities.
Currently, there are searches underway for a new provost and vice president for administration.
Joann Mitchell, the vice provost for administration in charge of implementing the University's equal opportunity policy — who is also one of the most prominent blacks in the administration — says it isn't necessary for the new provost or vice president for administration to be a minority, but it sure would be nice.
"To think that we've only seen progress if we have a provost who's a person of color or a vice president of administration who's of color [is misleading,]" she says. The real question is whether the new administrators "share President Tilghman's values of diversity and excellence as we move forward."
But she adds: "Would I like it if we had one of the two senior appointments be a person of color? Absolutely."
Outside of the senior administrative realms, there are a few high-level minorities in the administration, including Director of Communications Lauren Robinson-Brown '85, Steven Healy, the head of Public Safety, and the sexual health office director Thema Bryant-Davis.
Maria Klawe, the engineering school dean who is cited as one of the most proactive administration officials working on recruiting more minorities, says, "The presence of role models of underrepresented groups among the faculty and administration are extremely important in recruiting and retaining students from those groups."
Student leaders agree.
Akanksha Hazari '05, co-president of the South-Asian Students Association, says that "as the campus itself becomes more diverse it is vital that students see faces within the senior ranks they are able to relate to."
The woman example
Under Tilghman's predecessor, Harold Shapiro *64, three senior administration figures were minorities: Dickerson, Albert Raboteau, as graduate school dean, and James Wei, as engineering school dean.
But though there are two fewer minorities now, the number of women in the administration has increased sizably.
In fact, 50 percent of Princeton's senior administrators are women — a percentage significantly higher than the next-closest school, the University of Pennsylvania, where 32 percent of senior administrators are female.
University officials say the higher number of women in the administration has highlighted the relatively small number of minorities in the administration.
Tilghman says: "I do think that the University administration has done a much more effective job at broadening the participation of women in the senior administration than it has in bringing under represented minorities to campus."
Vice Provost Mitchell says the administration's support for the University of Michigan law school's affirmative action case before the Supreme Court last year, as well as the recruitment of high-profile faculty members who are women, has "gotten a lot of people thinking about Princeton differently and in a good way."
She adds, "Once we begin to break the barrier for gender, we're hoping that we'll be able to see more rapid progress in being able to hire and retain people of color."
Across administrations
Starting under Shapiro's presidency, officials say, the University increased its efforts to reach out to minorities for high-level positions.
"During the last administration and the current one, what we've been doing is to look for ways to make sure that we're casting the net broadly," Mitchell says.
She says these ways include advertising positions in educational journals targeted at minorities, such as the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education and Hispanic Outlook, as well as "thinking creatively about how to recruit the best person for the job."
According to Mitchell, this includes taking advantage of informal, personal networks established by current minorities in senior administrative and faculty positions, in addition to reaching out to professional associations for minority groups.
"There are efforts to talk to people like me, like Dickerson, to see if there are candidates who are competitive" for senior-level administrative positions, Mitchell says.
As one high-level administration official describes the issue, "If people still think about Princeton as Fitzgerald's 'This Side of Paradise,' they're not going to think about Princeton."
But though Fitzgerald's Princeton is a "vestige of the past," the official says, "when you're trying to attract people to a community where they will feel comfortable, and all they have heard about is negative things, they're not even going to think about Princeton."
To avoid this kind of result, Mitchell says she asks candidates for top jobs at the University to tell her what they do and do not like about Princeton.
"I want to hear what it is that they are thinking, and either to have the opportunity to talk to them about where we are and where we're trying to go," she says. "The kinds of constructive criticism we hear is helpful in trying to determine how to move forward [in a way] which is consistent with our values about diversity, community, and excellence — all of which are completely compatible."
Mitchell sums up her argument, saying, "Sometimes the best candidates for a job may not be looking, and so the onus falls to us to find them."
An important part of this effort, she says, is diversifying the faculty itself.
She says she hopes that "we would have additional faculty members of color, which would help us broaden our immediate scope in terms of people who are here, but also using them as tools to reach out to others."
For appointments such as provost and dean of the faculty, candidates usually are already members of the faculty. Without a diverse faculty, there is, in effect, a significantly lower possibility that such positions could be held my persons of minority origin.
Mitchell warns that the challenge of recruiting more senior administration officials from minority backgrounds is a long term problem.
"In some ways, in an employment context, you're always needing to think somewhere down the road," she says, arguing that if the enrolment of people of color in doctoral programs across the nation does not increase, there will not be more minorities available to take-up high-level positions in higher education.
"You have to think about are there ways we could impact that, are there ways we could influence students to think about career choices," she adds. "I hazard a guess that [most Princeton students] aren't thinking about being a university administrator."
Dickerson says that sometimes she worries that all she'll be as dean is a symbol of race or gender, but finds hope in places can change, over time.
"There are still times when I worry about whether I've made the right decision and if so, are people outside seeing me as representing my race or my role. One of the things I learned at Swarthmore, if you're a dean, that's your identity. You're the administration," she says.
"But I think that over the course of my professional experience, I've had the great privilege of seeing institutions change. . . . I have tried to create a way to discuss and value diversity in a learning environment where they are faculty and administrations and students who reflect the very broad variety that we see both in the nation and in the world."
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