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By Mike Cuenca | September 22, 2000
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The KU memo mentioned in your Sept. 14 article "Minority hiring
doubted" is disturbing because it contains no references to minority
retention. Merely hiring more minority people won't help the university
increase its diversity as long as significant numbers of minority
people flee or are run off after they're hired. The "Report on the
Status of Women and Minorities at the University of Kansas," released
last spring by the KU Sexism and Racism Victims Coalition and available
online at www.seekpeace.com/KUSRVC, reveals that over the past six
years, almost half of the number of minority people hired by KU
resigned, retired, or were terminated.
To actually increase diversity, it's necessary to maintain a
workplace in which minority faculty, students, and staff feel welcome
and in which they are confident they have an equal opportunity to
succeed. When KU's administration dismantled legally mandated
affirmative action, they sent a signal that equal opportunity and the
protections of the workplace rights of minorities and women were no
longer a high priority. In many units, rhetoric replaced action.
For
example, when the dean of the School of Journalism assumed his position
in 1997, there were five minority people on the faculty and staff. He
proclaimed that the diversity of the school was a high priority and
that he would commit himself to increasing the diversity of the school.
Three years later, however, he's being sued in federal court for
discrimination and retaliation and today there are only three full-time
minority people on the school's faculty and staff (with one more of
those already terminated.) There are no remaining minority faculty and
staff who are not African American. Not only has he failed to increase
the school's diversity, he's actually decreased diversity both in the
number of minority people and in the number of ethnicities represented.
KU's
purposefully deceptive, politically correct rhetoric masks what they've
publicly termed their "unacceptable underutilization" of minorities.
Hiring more minorities is only half the solution. The other half of the
solution is to restore equal opportunity, respect for the law, common
decency, and due process to the KU campus.
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Originally published by the Lawrence Journal-World.
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