University of Virginia Library

The President's Committee

In establishing a Committee on
Educational and Employment Opportunities,
Obligations and Rights, President Shannon has
increased by one the fifty-odd Administrative
committees now in existence at the University.
It is a unique committee in that it contains
a significant number of students, perhaps a
long awaited recognition of the desire by
many students to participate in the decision
making process, to accept responsibility, and
to improve the conduct of an institution of
higher learning for the benefit of all. It is a
committee which grew out of the cognizance
that things are significantly wrong with
educational and employment policies at this
University.

The problems with which the committee
must deal are not easily overlooked; in fact,
they stare back almost embarrassingly. We live
in a lily-white University community which
does not even pay a significant portion of its
non-academic employees a living wage. Our
solutions have not been particularly impressive:
a black part-time Assistant to the Dean
of Admissions (not Assistant Dean of
Admissions) to help recruit black students; an
extremely weak, proposed Ethnic studies
program (not a Black Studies Program); a very
uncertain and severely limited Summer
transition program; and a state legislature
which thinks a wage in the $1.40 range is fine
and that even if workers don't like it, they
don't have the right to form unions and strike.

It may take decades for the state to change
its stance on its employees' right to bargain
but hopefully the fight for educational
opportunity will not be quite so formidable.
The disadvantaged student in the nation sees
the national goal of equal opportunity in
higher education for every American as an
unfilled promise. This and many other
Universities have no formal programs for
helping "high risk" students. As a Southern
Education Report put it last year, "Most
American colleges and universities are success-oriented
— they cater to young people who
have mastered 12 years of schooling in
preparation for college, are solvent and who
have adjusted to the style and strictures of the
prevailing culture. But thousands of
potentially able youngsters do not qualify by
those standards and most of the Nation's
colleges and universities have not yet decided
whether they have the responsibility, the
resources, the skills or the desire to serve
them." A state university, we think, does have
such a responsibility and should make every
effort it can to find the resources, skills and
desires if it does not already have them. Not
to do so is a disservice not only to such young
people but also to the nation for failing to
capitalize on the resources they offer.

Two specific recommendations suggested
last year to Commissioner Harold Howe by
the dean of a state university should prove
highly significant to the new Presidential
Committee:

"First, I believe we should call on every
institution of higher learning to establish
special programs on a large scale to identify
select and train minority groups for
participation in academic and vocational
pursuits. By waiving normal admission
requirements, by providing massive special
tutoring and other academic and non-academic
help to assist students in making the
transition to college life, by expanding normal
university-associated employment and creating
special scholarships to render further
financial aid, and by adding minorities to their
faculties and staff on more than a token basis,
schools can commence to lend their resources
to the most challenging issue facing our
society today.

"Secondly, we should call on the student
body of the nation to render unprecedented
volunteer service in collaboration with the
programs organized by universities. While
tutoring has been the activity of a few
well-motivated students in recent years, it
must be developed to the level of a systematic
campus-wide, nationwide program, involving
not only academic subjects, but personal and
social skill programs as well. Naturally, all of
these action-oriented programs should be
developed with extensive leadership from
those minorities they are intended to serve. In
addition, the universities and colleges must
develop means of granting academic credit for
the above activities, making them integral to
the academic life of the school. Such a
program might become the vanguard of new
concepts of social relevance, opening alternative
routes to a Bachelor's degree."

Mr. Shannon's new committee is, as he
puts it, "one of central importance to the
current and future welfare of the University."
We urge them to make their recommendations
carefully and comprehensively and with all
due haste, for the first step toward tolerable
equal opportunity and educational
opportunities rests on their shoulders.