Vindauga

The university that I attend has recently decided, in a preemptive move, to eliminate multicultural fellowships. I have been put in charge of an ad hoc committee whose purpose is to write a letter to the administration expressing our contention that this move is ethically unsound.

I’m writing this as a way of clarifying my thoughts, of honing in on the point that I need to make to the administration though I suspect that no matter how good my argument, they won’t listen.

The university is not denying the worth of multiculturalism, so an argument for affirmative action and multiculturalism is not in order. Although, the university is basing its recent change in position on a fear that the happenings in Michigan will prompt similar actions in Florida. I have been told that the university is anticipating a supreme court decision in the Michigan case. However, there is no supreme court case concerning Michigan at this time (there was one in 2003, which upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s application procedure [imagine the comedy of the law school, screwing up the law], which is the catalyst for the current referendum in Michigan. The woman who was denied entry is now seeking to change Michigan law). There are two cases concerned with affirmative action issues currently on the supreme court docket (and I really can’t wait for Dahlia Lithwick to start talking about them) but both are concerned with primary education and neither is directly concerned with Michigan (one is about schools in Seattle and the other about schools in Kentucky. I suspect that Seattle will be upheld but Kentucky will argue that it is an excessive burden but I really know nothing about how supreme court decisions come down, I couldn’t predict Roberts et al. if my life depended on it). So, it might seem that the question is, ‘what case is the university concerned about?’ But I don’t think so, I think folks are just mixing up the information; its like a bad game of telephone listening to the grape vine at a major university.

Having said all this, what am I concerned with? The university is eliminating some fellowships, legally they are within their right. If the university is not denying multiculturalism, then what am I (we) upset about? Previously there were 78 of these fellowships awarded every year. Although these fellowships are colloquially referred to as, by those in my department who actually have them, as ‘brown people fellowships’ it should be pointed out that their purpose has always been to increase the representation of underrepresented groups in various fields, which in my field means anybody not male or not white. It should also be pointed out that these are fellowships not an admissions policy (no supreme court case that I know of has dealt with fellowships). Because of the university’s unspecified fear they are eliminating the entire program and replacing it with one that is expressly open to all university students and is expressly concerned with ‘under representation’. This all sounds fine. The problem is that there will only be 20 of these fellowships. This means that 58 people who currently have fellowships will not have a fellowship next year. 78 individuals who had fellowships are now competing for 20.

The university has always been careful to point out that all of these fellowships are one year, renewable fellowships. The university is legally entitled to not give these fellowships out. However, all TA’s and RA’s are given under the same conditions and we are told the ‘renewable’ part with a wink and a nod (don’t screw up and you’ll keep your funding); the point is that all sources of funding are used as a tool to recruit high quality students to the university. TA’s, RA’s, and fellowships are constantly updated and increased to keep pace with other institutions that the university considers peers and institutions that the university wants to emulate. It is admitted that a big part of what makes a research 1 university successful is the graduate student body, which at my university is more than 1,500 people (I think its double the faculty). Being able to recruit the best possible graduate students depends on this kind of funding.

So, when the 78 people with multicultural fellowships decided to come to school here they were deciding between universities and the offers that those universities made to them. Even though the university said “this is a one year fellowship which is renewable” and thus made it clear that the student wouldn’t necessarily have that fellowship next year, the school still led the individual to believe that the fellowship would be there. I am not taking the administration to task for denying some individual or even some group of individuals a continuing fellowship, I am taking them to task for not honoring their commitment to the individuals whom they enticed here with the prospect of funding. I think this is a subtle point, one which I need to make extremely clear in the letter that I write.

I am saying that the administration acted unethically (not illegally or imprudently) by convincing individuals to come a school that had a series of programs and then deciding to eliminate those programs (and, I will ignore for now that the administration has not officially told any of these students their funding programs will be eliminated). The opportunity to funding, which played a role in the student’s decision process, is not longer an opportunity. This is the same as if the school invited a 20 students to come enroll in their Physics program and then, after a year, decided that the Physics program was only going to have 7 students; each student still has the chance of getting one of those seven spots but the conditions and structure which brought them here are no longer here. It is likely, in fact probable, that most of these students would have attended other universities had they been informed, prior to accepting, that this was going to happen.

Anyway, I need to make that more clear.