Few minorities among University's senior ranks

The University began a concerted effort to increase faculty and staff diversity five years ago. Still, the senior administration — the 25 highest-ranking officials in charge of University governance — has far less minority representation than the student body, and less than the senior administrations at several peer institutions, including Harvard, Dartmouth and Cornell.

Minorities make up 8 percent of the members of Princeton’s senior administration, which includes officials from Tilghman and the senior deans to the vice presidents and the University librarian, according to the University Governance website. For the student body, that number is 32 percent.

“It doesn’t make sense that the student body looks one way but the administration looks a different way,” said Charles Wright ’11, president of both the Black Student Union and the Black Men’s Awareness Group. “I just wonder what the problem is.”

In 2004, the University set out to examine this question, establishing the Diversity Working Group to look at diversity issues among employees, including senior administrators. At the time, Dickerson was the only minority who was a senior administrator.

Now there are two: Nilufer Shroff, who is of Indian descent, was named the University’s first chief audit and compliance officer in 2007. The rest of the senior administrators are white.

Diversity in that group is a “priority” for the University and a topic that has been discussed by senior administrators, said Terri Harris Reed, the vice provost for institutional equity and diversity.

But Dickerson’s planned retirement has raised new questions about why the University’s senior administration — in many ways, the public face of the University — is not more diverse.

“Prospective students or people looking at Princeton and trying to see Princeton ... will look at [the senior] administration,” Julia Xu ’11, the co-president of the Chinese Students Association, said. “Having that administration not reflect diversity in the student body will give a distorted view.”

But this is not just an issue at Princeton, said sociology professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, who is an expert in diversity and immigration.

“This is not a problem that Princeton University can solve alone,” she explained. “There are more people of minority backgrounds in this University than there used to be, perhaps not enough, but … it’s a problem that transcends much of what the University can do.”

The need for a ‘multi-faceted effort’

Five years ago, at Tilghman’s request, the Diversity Working Group was formed to examine diversity and recruitment among all employees at the University. Tilghman declined to comment for this article.

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The group, co-chaired by Dickerson and Executive Vice President Mark Burstein, was specifically charged with studying ethnic and racial diversity, Dickerson told the ‘Prince’ in February 2005.

The working group was created at a time when significant controversy surrounded issues of diversity, especially following the departure of at least 10 minority staff members in fall 2004. “I think there is a problem,” Reed told the ‘Prince’ in September of that year.

“If people aren’t feeling validated or respected in their work, then they’ll look for places [where] they are,” one of the University Health Services staffers who departed said in a September 2004 interview.

The working group issued a report in October 2005 that called for better communication among those working in different diversity initiatives and an emphasis on “affinity groups,” where employees of the same race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation can meet.

“It is clear to the working group that changing the culture of an institution only happens through sustained multi-faceted effort,” the report said. The working group called on the University to work with hiring managers to further educate them on diversity issues and to increase the diversity of applicant pools.

In the four years since the report’s release, there has been turnover in six senior administrative positions. Five of those positions were filled by women, including Shroff, who is the sole member of an ethnic minority hired since the report’s release.

Among peers, U. lags behind

Princeton lags behind many of its peer and neighboring institutions when it comes to diversity among senior administrative officials, according to data obtained by the ‘Prince’ from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, Duke and The College of New Jersey.

Princeton trails behind all of those schools except Yale, which has no minority members among its senior administration of eight university officers and 14 deans, Yale President Richard Levin said in an e-mail to the ‘Prince.’

“There are, regrettably, no officers or deans of color, but we have considered candidates of color for most positions,” Levin said. “We make a special effort to ensure that in all searches for senior positions we identify candidates who are women or members of minority groups.”

The gap between Princeton and most of the other schools is modest: Princeton’s 8 percent compares with Cornell’s and Duke’s 11 percent and Dartmouth’s 12 percent. But 15 percent of Harvard’s officers, deans and vice presidents are minorities, and the diversity among the senior administration at The College of New Jersey is 18 percent.

Dickerson noted, however, that universities define “senior administration” in different ways. She instead emphasized the “steady progress” the University has made in diversifying the roughly 250 members who make up a broader swath of administrators, called the “executive, administrative and managerial” positions.

In 2004, 8.3 percent of people in those positions were ethnic minorities, while the median among the University’s “peer institutions” was 11.4 percent, according to statistics provided by the University. In 2008, that number at Princeton grew to 13 percent, closing in on a median among peer institutions that rose to 14 percent that year.

University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 defined these “peer institutions” as “other highly selective institutions, including those on the upper East Coast, on the West Coast and in the Midwest,” she said in an e-mail.

The University’s progress in closing the gap between its minority representation and its peers’ was a step in the right direction, Dickerson said.

“That’s not necessarily a number to say we’re showing leadership in this area — we’re not necessarily really thrilled about it,” she said. “But I believe that the efforts that the University has been making over the past several years have been very intentional and very focused.”

‘A whole spectrum’ not represented

Some students, however, said they do not think these efforts have yielded adequate progress.

“There’s a whole spectrum of people of different colors who aren’t represented,” Wright said. “They would be able to offer something different.”

Leslie-Bernard Joseph ’06, a former president of both the Black Student Union and the USG who was a vocal critic of the senior administration’s diversity at the time the working group was established, also said that ethnic and racial diversity would bring in a variety of backgrounds and therefore allow the University to govern better.

“In order for the University to just serve all of its students well, the people that make decisions need to have some sort of perspective on how the different communities at Princeton feel,” he explained. “While that doesn’t mean exclusively that people who are making decisions need to be [the] same race of the person who they are thinking about, I think it’s extremely helpful that ... people [in] the administration have a greater understanding of that perspective.”

University officials said Princeton strives to bring people with a variety of perspectives to the senior administration.

“There are research studies that have been done to show that in a work setting [and] in a learning setting ... the outcomes you get are different [if] you have a group of people from different backgrounds,” Reed said. “You have a different perspective, set of experiences, background to bring to issues [and] how you solve problems.”

And diversity should not be defined solely by ethnic minority representation, Dickerson said.

“It’s easier probably to see color than some other dimensions of diversity. I want to emphasize that we are making every effort to make sure that our pools do include candidates of color in them,” she explained. “So while some elements of diversity are less visible than others, I think it’s notable that we do have LGBT people on the University’s cabinet, that we have people from different ages and generations, that we have people who have had immigrant backgrounds, and others.”

Obstacles to increasing diversity

The university’s efforts to increase diversity in the senior administration face serious challenges from the stereotypes Princeton has often been tagged with, as well as the negative treatment of minority groups in the United States over generations, students and faculty said.

Pressures to incorporate minorities into administrative positions at colleges and universities increased at several other institutions in the 1980’s, when minorities “were incorporated precisely as a result of the pressure on the part of students and other groups,” Fernandez-Kelly said.

But some of the new staffers, she added, were ill-prepared for the jobs they took.

“They became terrible embarrassments,” she said. “I realize students are impatient the same way that many of us are impatient with change that is positive, but I think that sometimes students don’t realize how difficult it is to both reach out and try to incorporate members of minority groups who are qualified.”

Some students attribute the particular challenge that Princeton faces in trying to diversify its senior administration to its reputation as an institution where, historically, diversity was not always emphasized.

“I think for a long time, a diverse range of candidates would not have applied to a place like Princeton just because of, you know, the negative perception that people had of the place because of whatever historical stereotypes that the University has,” Joseph explained.

“I think that as the school begins to change for the better [and], in many ways, becomes a more progressive place, you begin to have a broader pool of applicants from which to choose,” he added.

Fernandez-Kelly, however, said the problem is long-term.

“The problem with African-Americans is the level of hostility [in the United States] they have experienced for many generations cannot be wiped out in a single generation,” she said, adding that there is “still a lot of disadvantage being faced by working-class and unemployed African-Americans.”

“And so suddenly to want to have a large pool of qualified candidates for administrative positions is not terribly realistic,” she noted.

Making progress

To further incorporate the University into the community and emphasize its commitment to diversity, the University has actively reached out to local minority communities, said Robert Martinez, the University’s first manager of diversity and inclusion.

Martinez, who was hired in 2007 based on the working group’s recommendations, said the University has held “town and gown meetings” with local minority professionals.

He described the University as a “cradle to grave” employer like many universities, so diversity among employees will lag behind current trends.

“Our employee base [is] what this area of New Jersey looked like 25 years ago,” Martinez explained.

He also noted that there are about half a dozen “employee resource groups” — including the Princetonians of Color Network and groups for the Chinese community, South Asian administrators, Latino administrators, international community and LGBT community — that allow minority employees to collaborate and connect with one another.

A search party, with a ‘diverse slate’

The search for Dickerson’s replacement will be aided by the Boston search firm Isaacson, Miller. It will assist the University in obtaining a “diverse slate” of applicants, Martinez said.

“We want all kinds of diversity, not necessarily racial [or] ethnic diversity [but] regional diversity, age, sexual orientation,” he added.

The firm is also helping the University in its search for a director of Public Safety, according to the firm’s website.

Overall, Dickerson — who has been at the University for nine years — said diversity has increased greatly during her tenure.

“Princeton feels quite different than it did, from my point of view, four, and eight, and 10 years ago ... But we could do more. We should not be satisfied with the gains that we have made,” Dickerson said. “Sometimes it takes … questions from students or observations made by those on the outside looking in to remind us that we do have a way to go.”