"For too long, the debate over race and admissions has consisted mainly of clashing opinions, uninformed by hard evidence," reads a passage in the highly-acclaimed book The Shape of the River.
Taking cues from this stance, the University is embarking on a candid long-term project to generate easily digestible data on the relative experiences of its black students.
The project complements the "dashboard indicators" already compiled to provide quick glimpses of the status of hot topics such as admissions and financial aid. These indicators help University officials evaluate specific improvement or deterioration over time, much as the information displayed on a car's dashboard keeps the driver informed of the car's status.
"[We need] to have a better sense of how we set goals and measure progress in the area of greater inclusiveness and respect for diversity-particularly support for African-American students," explained President Nan Keohane, who, late last spring, charged the President's Council on Black Affairs with the duty of developing the indicators. "[The dashboard indicators] will not just set general priorities but give those priorities greater specificity by saying we want to make sure that black students at Duke are more likely to be supported through various academic challenges than some of them have been in the past."
After a semester of studying various options, PCOBA drafted a game plan at its December meeting. The council is implementing the initiative this semester and will have a report for Keohane by April.
PCOBA has formed two committees: a research committee, which will identify a limited set of data points to be tracked across all races, and an action committee, which will explore academic and non-academic interventions. PCOBA members hope the empirical data will both accurately quantify the impact of an environment that does not support black students as it does others and prompt action.
"Our rationale [for forming the committees concurrently] is that we must not wait for the indicators to prove what
PCOBA decided not to release information about environmental effects without also investigating the climate itself; the indicators will seek to explain the relationship between the two, White said. She added that the burden minority students face in navigating through a predominantly white campus is akin to "taking a fifth course that you don't get credit for."
The five or six data points selected by the research committee will include both "achievement/outcomes data" and "interaction and experience data." This latter category might include ongoing discussion groups to track reaction to specific campus events or surveys addressing experience and perception questions.
The "achievement/outcomes data" might include predictor/performance ratings, Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) survey information about seniors' satisfaction levels and a list of black students with leadership involvement and academic recognitions.
PCOBA is particularly interested in the predictor/performance ratings, which reveal that in the aggregate, black students at all ability levels under-perform relative to their white peers. This measure-which will likely be selected as a dashboard indicator by PCOBA-suggests that black students have a different experience at the University (see sidebar, page 1).
"We believe that both quantitative and qualitative methods are important," said Assistant Professor of Psychology Nancy Hill, a co-chair of the research committee. "While it is informative and convenient to examine aggregate evaluations of the climate and experiences at Duke, it is important also to listen to and include individual experiences of students at Duke."
The action committee, which met for the first time Thursday, is "preparing to recommend that the University extend the paradigms of two very successful model programs to locally-funded programs tailored to Duke," said co-chair Janet Dickerson, vice president for student affairs.
One of these initiatives is Duke's chapter of the Mellon Program, which provides research opportunities to black, Hispanic and native American undergraduates. Dickerson did not name the second program, but remarked that many other Duke and non-Duke programs could be replicated, such as Martha Absher's acclaimed recruitment program in engineering.
"Our goals would be to endorse multiple strategies that reach students and faculty simultaneously, and to encourage research into campus climate issues," Dickerson said. "Also, we will continue to sponsor speakers who can describe research and 'best practices' in place in other settings."
Keohane has said she will offer financial support to PCOBA's initiatives, which are in line with projects underway elsewhere in response to The Shape of the River, written by former Harvard president Derek Bok and former Princeton president William Bowen, who will lecture at Duke Feb. 18.
The former presidents broke new ground in their work that, through arguments based on empirical evidence, illustrates the metaphor in its title: Although the analogy of the "pipeline" has been used in the past to demonstrate the centrality of getting minorities on-track to compete in life after schooling, they argued that a "river," with all of its unexpected turns and varying depths, is a more telling comparison.
"One of the things that led me to think in terms of dashboard indicators for this particular purpose," Keohane said, "was reading The Shape of the River and being very impressed by both the specific data and the arguments... and the way which they were able to provide a context for talking... about the under-performance of African Americans," Keohane said. "Bowen and Bok have given us a language and a sense of permission to talk about these things in a creative and constructive way."
The book also reveals that Duke is not alone; although its data set is different, The Shape of the River suggests that blacks underperform relative to their white peers at selective colleges nationwide.
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