By Marc Fisher and Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 16 1997; Page A01
In retrospect, the University of the District of Columbia seems to have been built to fail, according to faculty members, former trustees and other educators.
Jerry-built from three colleges with radically different purposes and cultures, slapped together in the heat of the District's struggle for self-rule, UDC has suffered since its birth from the same structural problems that threaten its existence today: confusion over its mission, weak leadership and lack of public support. In an era of tightening purse strings, UDC has adapted to the new reality only slowly, clinging to the status quo, in the view of administrators, professors and former trustees.
Times were different in 1976, when the law that created UDC guaranteed employees of all three predecessor colleges -- D.C. Teachers College, Federal City College and Washington Technical Institute -- that they would keep their jobs for five years. A generation later, many remain. The average age of a UDC faculty member is 55; many departments have not hired a professor in a decade or more. A majority of the full-time faculty members have been at the school since it began, according to school statistics.
"All three bureaucracies were kept on, everything in triplicate," said Jim Ford, former chief of staff for the D.C. Council's Education Committee.
It wasn't until recently that a reorganization ended the practice of having three chief librarians -- one from each of the old institutions, UDC spokesman John Britton said. Also until recently, UDC had separate programs of urban studies, urban affairs and urban planning -- each in a different department with administrators and support staff, Britton added.
UDC has been a revolving door for top administrators: In 20 years, there have been nine interim or permanent presidents and more than 25 provosts. But no one has been able to improve a reputation that started out weak and never grew strong.
The city's only public institution of higher learning was born as a place with almost revolutionary intentions, dominated by a faculty filled with civil rights movement veterans who believed that an urban, open-admissions college could help change the world, or at least the lives of poor, black Washingtonians.
And from the start, the institutions and individuals that usually support a college -- employers, foundations, politicians -- seemed wary of or even antagonistic toward UDC.
Six years ago, former president Jimmy Carter, speaking to Washington's corporate and governmental elite at a board meeting of the nonprofit Federal City Council, spoke truth to power: The District is sliding into an abyss, Carter said. How many of you think the city will turn around in five or 10 years because of your efforts?
"Not a soul raised his or her hand," recalled Kenneth Sparks, executive vice president of the civic group.
The council soon launched the so-called Agenda Process, a drive to define how the city's movers and shakers could get Washington back on its feet. But in subsequent months, the topic of UDC never came up, Sparks said, except for a brief, informal discussion about whether the school might be better off as a two-year college.
Appealing to the Establishment was hardly a goal of UDC's founders, an attitude that persists to this day. "We have admittedly not made an effort to explain ourselves to the business community," Britton said, conceding that "UDC is an object of amusement to many people. But the business community in this city is not of this city. It is of the suburbs."
From the start, some of UDC's faculty and staff -- as well as city leaders such as Mayor Marion Barry -- saw the college as a means of black empowerment. "Back in the days when people were shouting `Free D.C.!' and `Home Rule Now!' UDC was very important to the self-image of this city," Britton added.
"Federal City College became a magnet for young academics who saw themselves as building a different kind of society," said Howard Croft, who came to Federal City in 1969, its second year, and now is chairman of UDC's Urban Studies Department. There were to be no academic departments, no tenure, no grades. "Now that I look back, there is something that must be said about the errors of youthful exuberance. We had an opportunity, and we squandered it. We went from a reputation for being unruly to being a drain on the public budget, a place for students who should not be in college anyway."
While some faculty members pursued a political agenda, others wanted UDC to be a research university. Still others stuck to a vocational school model.
"UDC appears to have no shared vision, nothing that everybody buys into," concluded "Critical Junctures," a study of the university's early years by two UDC professors, Meredith Rode and Marie Racine. "At UDC, as individuals held onto the traditions, beliefs, norms and priorities of their former institutions, cultures clashed and feelings of loss, frustration, fear, apathy and resistance were experienced."
Sylvia Hill, 56, a UDC criminal justice professor, moved to Washington 24 years ago to work in the anti-apartheid movement. With friends who helped create Federal City College, Hill -- who herself had been a high school dropout and teenage mother -- thrived in what she recalled as "a period of students demanding curriculum changes and open enrollment."
UDC should be a place of political awakening, Hill said she and many of her colleagues believed, a place where students "could begin to realize how shortchanged their secondary education was, how to be poor is to be demeaned."
Hill and her colleagues were -- and still are -- proud to be part of a place where professors set up tutoring programs for local youths, where the university holds classes for inmates at Lorton prison, where she knows the family problems of her students.
"In this period of anti-poor sentiment, I still think it's legitimate to educate the poor," she said. "But some people here want a different kind of university -- they're ashamed of the remedial classes."
As do many UDC professors, Hill takes the lack of respect for UDC as a racial affront. Under a "Remember Soweto" postcard in her office, Hill argued that "the university has become Willie Hortonized. When you want to create images that fulfill racial stereotypes, UDC is used as a racial epithet."
But for all the professors who see UDC's current plight as a racial issue, others say the school has suffered from errors of politics and marketing. Croft said UDC has erred in identifying itself more as a historically black college than as a city university. "The only way for the District to break its dependence on government as the primary source of employment," Croft said, "is to sell the quality of its work force, and education -- public education -- is the only way to get there. That's what UDC has failed to sell."
For that failure, Croft and others blame UDC's trustees and the mayors who appointed them.
Unlike most colleges' governing boards, UDC's was created as a political body, not an educational or fund-raising arm of the school. Originally, 11 of the 15 members were required to be District residents, limiting access to the kinds of national business, political and educational leaders colleges often seek for their prestige and fund-raising ability.
Mayors Barry and Sharon Pratt Kelly both sought to appoint trustees from all eight wards of the city, a policy that favored political associates of the mayors over nationally known educators and business people.
"There were people on that board who had no more business being there than I should be playing linebacker for the Redskins," said Roger Wilkins, the writer and civil rights leader, who served on the UDC board from 1986 to 1991 and now teaches at George Mason University.
"Politicians politicized this institution. Marion treated UDC as just another District agency. `Somebody at some agency is mad at Joe, so get him a job at UDC, or so-and-so's a big backer, so put him on the UDC board.' Sharon was really contemptuous of the institution. She just looked down on it," Wilkins continued. "Marion might be . . . very late, but he would get to the UDC graduation. He knew at some level that those were his people. Sharon never gave UDC the time of day."
Kelly at one point rejected 12 of the 15 names submitted to her by the citizens committee that nominates UDC trustees. Among those rejected were Wilkins and the president of the American Council on Education, Robert Atwell.
She chose instead, among others, Lorraine Williams, who had been one of Kelly's professors at Howard University; Shirley Hammond, a former neighbor of Kelly's; Michele Hagans, daughter of a prominent D.C. developer; and Frances L. Murphy, editor of the Washington Afro-American newspaper.
Kelly's appointments led the D.C. Council's Education Committee to try to wrest control of the UDC board away from the mayor in 1993, but the effort failed.
The former mayor is especially derided on the UDC campus for the favoritism she showed toward Howard, her alma mater. Although she regularly visited the Howard campus, Kelly never made it to a commencement ceremony at the city's own university, according to UDC administrators and faculty.
Kelly and Barry did not return calls for comment.
"The board of trustees has undermined the school probably more than anyone else," said Steve Diner, a George Mason University history professor who taught at UDC from 1972 to 1985 and served on the committee to nominate trustees from 1987 to 1993, when he quit in protest of Kelly's appointments. "The nominating committee was never independent. Mayor Barry's appointments person would come in and say, `Well, this is who the mayor wants, so could you put these three names on your list?' "
In recent years, the trustees had ceded control of their agenda to President Tilden J. LeMelle, according to Ford and former trustees. The trustees even passed a resolution giving the president the authority to forward UDC's annual budget to District officials without board approval. In 1995, Congress passed a law ordering the UDC trustees to vote on and approve budgets before they were submitted to the mayor.
"We felt someone at the institution should be looking at the budget," Ford said. "First we tried to prod, and then we had to try to force them to be responsible. It's sad that the city council and Congress had to pass a law requiring the board to do what a board should do."
Hagans, now the board chairwoman, conceded that the board was inattentive as the current fiscal crisis developed. "Had we addressed these issues earlier, I think we wouldn't be at this place today," she said. "But that's water under the bridge."
The trustees "just lost sight of what this university is supposed to be about," said Keith Johnson, the undergraduate student government president. "This place is supposed to be about creating a new middle class to replace the people that have exited from this city. We can't bring them back, but maybe we can move another group of people up a level."
Johnson, 29, cites himself as an example of a typical UDC student who could not go to any other college but whose life has been changed by this one. Although he attended DeMatha High School, one of the area's best Catholic schools, "I really did not excel. I wasn't motivated." Johnson, who grew up in Southeast Washington, bounced around for several years after high school -- working, failing to get into the military because of a medical problem, failing to get into Howard University because of his low grades and board scores.
Now a senior in UDC's business management program, Johnson is in his sixth year at the college. Johnson, a popular former football player with a warm personality, credits open enrollment with turning him from life on the streets to life in the study carrels. "And I could give you countless stories of people who turned it around here," he added.
UDC administrators tout the school's achievements, noting that UDC ranks among the top 10 universities in the number of bachelor's degrees in science and engineering awarded to black students and among the top 30 in the number of master's degrees given to blacks. But it is not the high-achievers who dominate the school's image or who account for most of its expenses. Under open admissions, any high school graduate may enroll at UDC, and 89 percent of students require remedial work in English or math, or both.
According to the college catalogue, more than 80 percent of English and math classes are remedial. And the poor preparation of UDC students appears to be consuming an ever-larger portion of the school's resources. When UDC was created, it took an average of one year of remediation to bring D.C. public school students to college-level proficiency. Today, the average is a little more than two years, according to former D.C. auditor Otis Troupe and UDC administrators.
Students say they appreciate the college for doing what their secondary schools failed to do. "UDC made me feel it was okay to take basic math," said Diane Ellerbee, 40, an unemployed, second-year student. "Academically, I felt I could have gone to another school, but UDC was my way to feel comfortable without being pressured."
UDC students do not resemble stereotypical college students. They generally are working adults, and many are parents. The average age is 29. Seventy-two percent are black; 3 percent are white. Although the proportion of foreign students at UDC has increased lately from about 8 percent to 13 percent, the composition of the student body otherwise has been fairly stable, according to university figures.
Although UDC has a number of dedicated, talented teachers, the faculty also shares some blame for the college's failure to thrive, administrators and former trustees contend.
A little more than half of UDC's faculty members have doctoral degrees, compared with an average of 80 percent for other four-year institutions, according to data compiled by the D.C. Council. On average, UDC faculty members attract less than $10,000 annually in federal grants and contracts, compared with a national average of more than $30,000, the council reported.
"The faculty was hired in slapdash, haphazard ways, very quickly . . . not competitively, as other universities do," Diner said. "I'm an example. Someone saw my resume and I was just hired, sight unseen."
This spring, UDC will learn whether the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools will strip the university of its accreditation, a decision that probably would force the college to close. Without accreditation, "it would be pretty tough to keep going," said Ted Marchese, vice president of the American Association for Higher Education.
"The academic climate and classroom instruction at UDC is perilously close to falling below the minimum quality level," according to the report that placed the school on warning status last year. If UDC is forced "to take further cuts in its appropriations . . . it will not be able to sustain a quality academic environment."
With accreditation in trouble and budget cuts an annual event, it's no wonder enrollment is sinking, Johnson said. "Anyone who has the ability to go elsewhere has done so. They're scared. They ask, `Is this place even going to be here?' "
The crisis has put the university administration on the defensive.
"We didn't do anything wrong," Britton said. "This crisis is not of our making. There are so many things we do so well. We have a mortuary science program second to none. But we have been punished more severely than any other agency in the city, pronounced guilty in the court of public opinion. If we can graduate someone who used to mess around with hubcaps and they go on to get a PhD at Harvard, how do people get the nerve to question our effectiveness?"
In the growing struggle over who goes and who stays as the control board and UDC slice away hundreds of jobs, UDC's loyalists are sad to see their institution turning on itself.
Administrators say faculty should be the first to go. "Most of the faculty can walk right out of here and get another job," Britton said.
Faculty members say dozens, even hundreds of administrators need to be lopped off. "The administration is bloated with high salaries," said Hill, the criminal justice professor. "We have a history of presidents and administrators who have failed us, but why is it logical for students and faculty to suffer because of that?"
Hill paused. "As we say in the movement, we're keeping our eyes on the prize," she said. "But part of you just feels beaten down, nowhere to go."
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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