Fade to white St. Michael's is least diverse college in least diverse state
Photo illustration by Laura Tuveson
By Erik Wells and Chris White News Editors
It was the fall of 2005 and Amdework Assefa, an African-American first-year student, was working hard to finish his homework in his Founders Hall room. When he was done he shared the good news with his roommate.
“Hey, I got my work done quick,” Assefa, who goes by Eddie, said to his roommate.
“Yeah, that’s what’s up my n-----,” his roommate replied.
“It was one of those situations that was just really shocking,” Assefa said. “I confronted him and told him what he said to me was the wrong thing to say.”
His roommate left the room because he felt embarrassed, Assefa said. He kept trying to apologize. He offered to let Assefa call him “China Man” because of his half-Korean ethnicity.
The lack of diversity at St. Michael’s College can lead to a lack of understanding that might follow students into the work world, said Moise St. Louis, director of Multicultural Student Affairs.
“I hope, and I wish, students were more aware of the need for them to be exposed to diversity, but not all students are in the same place,” St. Louis said.
The population of degree-seeking undergraduates at St. Michael’s is 95 percent white. Of the 154 full-time faculty members, 142 are white. The staff at the college is primarily white, too. Only 14 of the 266 full-time staff members are minorities. Ethnicity is self-reported.
St. Michael’s is the whitest college in the whitest state in the country, according to U.S. Census and College Board data. Vermont is about 96 percent white.
Having a comfort level with other races will be a requirement in all types of work after college, St. Louis said. Alazar Assefa, Eddie’s twin brother, who likes to be called Al, said he agrees with St. Louis’ philosophy.
“If you leave this campus and step out into the real world, you are not prepared to deal with certain situations from here,” Al Assefa said. “You might have to deal with people of a different color, and if you don’t approach the situation the right way, then the consequences will be worse in real life.”
St. Michael’s intends to add diversity but is not proactive enough about it, said Linda Tran, president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Society.
“St. Michael’s always talks about being more culturally diverse, but it is only pushed by cultural groups like the MLK Society or Diversity
Coalition,” said Tran, a Vietnamese-American student.
The Assefas and Tran all graduated from Charlestown High School near Boston in 2005. There was a diverse student population in high school, said Tran, who said she has found white students at St. Michael’s to be welcoming to all students, including ethnically diverse students.
In 2002, former college President Marc vanderHeyden wrote Vision 2010, a view of the college for the end of the decade. It states: “After 2005, the target is to annually enroll 500 first-year students. Among those students enrolled in 2005, 25 percent must be non-New England students, and there should be a growing number of diversity among them.”
The first part of this goal, broader geographic diversity, has been met, said Vice President for Admission and Enrollment Jerry Flanagan. Admissions continues to struggle with increasing ethnic diversity.
In 2002, the number of full-time degree-seeking multicultural students was 125, but that number fell each year, dropping to 93 in 2005. It has increased slightly in the past two years. This year, 96 multicultural full-time undergraduate students are enrolled.
“I would say we’re treading water – we make a little progress, we lose a little progress,” Flanagan said. “There’s nothing that’s really been significant in moving us forward in this endeavor.”
Reflection of society
English professor Lorrie Smith, who specializes in African-American literature, has taught at St. Michael’s for 22 years. The lack of ethnic diversity has always been a concern, she said.
“I’ve always felt it’s a deficiency here that we have so few people of color,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of talk about how good it would be, but as long as I have been here it hasn’t changed.”
This lacking element is reflective of American society, Smith said.
“It’s such a complicated issue that the culture has created a way to make it seem not so bad.”
If students come from a predominantly white background, their ideas of people from other backgrounds are shaped primarily by the mass media, said John Gennari, director of ALANA U.S. ethnic studies program at the University of Vermont. ALANA stands for African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and Native Americans.
This leads to the creation of stereotypes associated with those groups of people, he said.
It’s important for those stereotypes to be challenged in college, Gennari said. That will require a student moving into the work force to move beyond preconceptions, he said.
“Discrimination is not necessarily something people are explicitly trying to do, but they may do it anyway if their own experience isn’t one that has given them sufficient exposure to a sufficiently diverse group of people,” Gennari said.
The media are a major influence on white people who do not live in culturally diverse areas, Al Assefa said, and can lead them to stereotype African-Americans, especially.
“That’s their way of knowing people with color,” he said. “Imagine the message they get from channels like MTV, where there’s not much rap that brings a positive message, and news reports of African-American athletes breaking the law.”
Students gravitate to an environment they have always known, Smith said.
“People tend to stay in their comfort zones. What’s comfortable is what’s familiar,” Smith said.
People sticking to their comfort zones is the main reason students on campus lack interest in student groups that focus on issues of race and diversity, such as Diversity Coalition and Martin Luther King Jr. Society, Al Assefa said.
“Most people on this campus only want to attend to interests of their own and don’t care about other issues like race,” he said. “To me, learning through the panels and discussions we have is just as important as class. But students are afraid to attend because they’re afraid their friends will look at them in a different way if they do.”
When white students notice promotions for these group discussions, they’ll think it doesn’t deal with them, Alazar Assefa said.
“White students tend to think, ‘I’m white, I’m not diverse,” he said. “But diversity is not a black-white issue.”
In the dark
People at St. Michael’s do not realize what they are missing out on, anthropology professor Patricia Delaney said.
“I think we’re doing our students a disservice by not encouraging them to interact with folks from diverse backgrounds and learning about the sort of cross-cultural challenges that come with interacting with people whose life experiences are really different from our own,” Delaney said.
Darren Cheung, a Chinese-American first-year from New York City, came to St. Michael’s to experience a difference from urban life.
Attending St. Michael’s is much different from his days in high school, where there were only a couple of white students, Cheung said. Getting used to life on campus wasn’t hard because he knew what he was getting into, he said.
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Cheung has talked with some of his white friends who want to gain an understanding about his culture, he said.
“It’s very interesting to educate that white majority who wants to know, but for those who want to ignore it, it’s going to be very hard for those guys,” Cheung said. “My best advice is to get to know as many people as you can because they are going to help you along the way.”
It’s important for people to avoid making assumptions, such as all black people have guns, or most Chinese people work at a Chinese restaurant, Cheung said.
“Assumptions lead to ignorance, and that’s a huge problem in our society today,” Cheung said.
Exposure to diversity should be associated with a St. Michael’s education, said Delaney, the anthropology professor.
“We call ourselves a liberal arts college, and the idea of the liberal (arts) education is that it’s supposed to broaden horizons and open eyes and introduce people to things they haven’t considered before, experiences they haven’t had,” Delaney said.
Increasing ethnic diversity is a collective goal in admissions, Flanagan said, but the school hasn’t been able to achieve it for a number of reasons, he said. One reason is Vermont is the whitest state in the country, which can act as a deterrent, he said.
Flanagan said another factor is students cannot be admitted if they don’t apply. In 2006, 88 minority students were admitted to St. Michael’s and 27 enrolled. This year, 92 were admitted and 26 enrolled, he said.
A number of minority students have high financial aid need, Flanagan said
“St. Michael’s endowment is modest, and we struggle, frankly, to meet the needs of all of our students, whether they are minority students or majority students,” Flanagan said. “That’s a huge challenge for us.”
St. Michael’s endowment in 2006 was $63.9 million, according to cnbc.com. In comparison, St. Anselm’s was $77.3 million and Middlebury College’s was $782 million.
The college as a whole will have to address this issue to instigate change, St. Louis said. A commitment has to be made, but there can be no commitment if the community doesn’t see the importance of the issue, he said. The location of the college and the cold can’t be an excuse for not attracting multicultural students, he said.
“We have to have that conversation – we have to have that realization, that recognition of the importance of diversity on a college campus – and then what are the strategies about how we can make it happen,” St. Louis said.
Small steps to become more aware of the ethnic diversity on campus is a good start. Eddie Assefa took a step by dealing with the racial comment from his roommate his first-year.
“I feel proud that I actually confronted him instead of holding back what needed to be said," he said.
