In his sixth year as president of Roger Williams University, Donald J. Farish is taking steps to dramatically diversify the school’s population – including offering a full graduate-level architecture scholarship to a displaced Syrian student, Abdullah Soufan.
Based in Bristol, within sight of a large rock protrusion known as Wampanoag King Philip’s Seat, Farish said RWU is steeped in regional and state history but hasn’t, historically, had a diverse student population.
In fact, he said, achieving a diverse student body has been difficult for “most private schools in Rhode Island” because “historically, Rhode Island has not had a large minority population.”
While striving for better diversity, Farish said it’s important U.S. colleges and universities “not be drawn into partisan battles,” support their students and stand up for what they believe in.
RWU is one of 60 schools offering scholarships (two full-ride law school and two full-ride, graduate-level architecture) to Syrian students through Institute for International Education’s Syria Consortium – what’s been the response?
It isn’t well-known. … We’ve been a bit thwarted because of decisions made regarding refugees [from Washington].
At the time this was started, the Trump administration restricted travel from some countries [and] Syria was one of them. The result has been the halting of Syrian [immigration] to this country.
We have one [displaced Syrian] architecture student [who traveled here] from Cyprus. … We haven’t had successful matches for the other [scholarships].
The presumption is [the travel restrictions] are not permanent. When it changes, we’ll enroll people as they match.
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SHARP DECLINE: Roger Williams University President Donald J. Farish says the school’s international student population has declined over the past two years, from 4.7 percent in 2014 to 3.2 percent in 2016, according to RWU data. / COURTESY ROGER WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY[/caption]
Why did RWU offer scholarships in these disciplines?
It’s our fervent hope one day all displaced Syrians will return to their country. … By providing opportunities for advanced study and training in law and architecture, we hope to contribute to rebuild[ing] these two foundational aspects of society.
Becoming part of IIE’s coalition, did the organization lay out standards for integrating displaced and refugee students?
IIE provided RWU with best practices on integrating international students into the campus community that we drew upon and adapted to meet the needs of the students we are welcoming to our university.
Beyond adopting their best practices, Roger Williams University has made every effort to connect with the Syrian student prior to his travels, discussing his interests and needs for his stay at RWU, assisting him in scheduling classes and his efforts in obtaining a visa.
Are there other Syrian refugee students enrolled in RWU now and how are they faring?
It’s hard to make an absolute statement, [but] I don’t know of any.
The situation in Syria calls out for something to be done. This is a tiny step, but if replicated can be meaningful. Maybe we can make a small difference.
Does RWU have a history of enrolling refugee students from war-torn nations?
My predecessor had the [Initiative to Educate Afghan Women] … which began in 2002 shortly after we invaded Afghanistan. … Many in that society thought educating women wasn’t a wise or even appropriate thing to do.
[Participation] wasn’t huge but … a number of [Afghan women] came here and took a degree program, the idea was they would return to Afghanistan as educated women and help rebuild the country.
But Afghanistan is still a chaotic environment and many of them did not go back.
Has RWU stayed in touch with them?
The program still exists, but we’re not running it.
We’ve seen a sharp diminution of international students over the past two years.
How large is RWU’s international student population?
We’ve seen a sharp diminution of international students over the past two years. … We’re talking a few dozen students rather than a couple hundred … and this is a national phenomenon.
New international students are modest in number because the U.S. isn’t seen as being as welcoming as it once was.
[Previously] we had about 50 Saudi Arabian students every year, then two years ago, the Saudi government elected to dial back those numbers, based, so they say, on the falling price of oil.
We also had a program where we took in 30 Brazilian students, mostly seniors or recent graduates in the STEM fields. … But, that program came and went within a period of two or three years.
We’ve had generations of students from the Dominican Republic … we have Chinese students, Indian students, but not in large numbers. … The well is drying up.
[According to RWU data, the number of enrolled international students has steadily fallen from 4.7 percent in 2014 to 3.2 percent in 2016.]
You’re saying RWU can’t attract as many people of diverse origins as it would like – has that hurt your native student population?
It’s easy to overemphasize the value of international students if it’s coming at the expense of creating opportunities for native, underrepresented groups. We’re trying to do both [and] seeing a steady increase in the percentage of [African, Latino, Asian and Native American] students.
It is concerning, frankly, when I look at open houses or accepted-student days because I would like to see visible minorities in the audience and I think other people feel the same.
Most of Rhode Island’s private schools haven’t had great success because, historically, Rhode Island hasn’t had a large minority population – something that’s changed in recent years. We’re all struggling to get appropriate representation, so we reflect the growing diversity of our community.
[ALANA enrollment at RWU has steadily grown from 11.7 percent of the student body in 2014 to 12.9 percent in 2015 and 13.3 percent in 2016, according to RWU data.]
Speaking of appropriate representation, could the Syrian-student scholarship program grow to include refugees from other countries?
It certainly could. … Each year we have a theme on which outside speaker and classroom work focuses. … Last year it was “The Year of the Refugee” – a decision I made the year before because it seemed we were spending a lot of time talking about refugees in this country … mass migrations coming out of Syria, in particular.
To underscore that, when we talk about refugees, we do not focus on the refugee of the day … [the discussion focused on Haitian, Dominican and other ethnicities too].
How do you define diversity at RWU and what are your diversification goals?
It’s not a case of quotas or pursuing the ever-changing demographic, [but of addressing diversity from different angles]: diversity of religion, sexual orientation, geography, wealth, family background.
Nobody lives on an island, we’re part of something larger.
It’s a disservice if [students] never see people with different belief systems, values or cultures.
There [are] two drivers to our [goals]: elemental fairness [to] people who have been historically excluded from higher education; … and preparing students for a much more diverse workplace, perhaps, than their parents’.
It’s a disservice if they never see people with different belief systems, values or cultures.
In the 21st century, does RWU draw on Roger Williams’ legacy of civil rights in its diversification campaign?
Absolutely. Roger Williams was way ahead of his time. … We borrow from his commitment to inclusivity repeatedly and it was more than tolerance he espoused … the idea of broad-mindedness was something he emulated too.
I’m not making him out to be a saint, but he practiced what he preached, literally.
We see him as an eminently worthwhile figure in ways that, frankly, a lot of the namesakes of other institutions aren’t. Amherst College struggles with Lord Jeffrey Amherst … he wasn’t a modern guy in terms of his attitude toward Native Americans. [His belief was] let’s exterminate them … [whereas] Roger Williams bought land from natives.
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FULL RIDE: Roger Williams University President Donald J. Farish says RWU offers full-ride scholarships in law and architecture to Syrian students to provide them opportunities for advanced study and training that will help them rebuild those foundational aspects of their society when they return to Syria. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY[/caption]
Historically, have Rhode Island colleges and universities prioritized diversity in higher education?
I know all the presidents of the other schools, we meet regularly, and this isn’t something we’ve talked about.
How has RWU, historically, prioritized diversity on campus?
One of our goals is to have a campus broadly reflecting the diversity of our region. We have increased our efforts in recent years to encourage more student applications from traditionally underrepresented groups. As a consequence, we’ve seen a slow but steady increase in the percentage of students of color in our freshmen classes:
• Fall 2012: 9.2 percent.
• Fall 2013: 9.8 percent.
• Fall 2014: 10.1 percent.
• Fall 2015: 10.9 percent.
• Fall 2016: 10.9 percent.
• Fall 2017: 11.8 percent.
In terms of gains made toward RWU’s diversity goals, how do you think RWU compares to other Rhode Island schools and state schools?
Private schools have lagged behind public [and state] schools, primarily because of cost. There’s a close relationship between being [classified as] underrepresented and not being particularly affluent. Unless they have large endowments, it’s a challenge for private schools to create easy pathways for underrepresented students to gain access to higher education.
One of the reasons we’re growing the Providence campus is because it gives [underrepresented groups] more points of entry into higher education.
There are opportunities here for people to acquire college credit in high school and access college as working adults who don’t have the luxury of … moving into the residence halls with their wife, three kids and cocker spaniel.
We have a population educated for yesterday’s world.
We have a population educated for yesterday’s world. … Jobs lost in 2008 aren’t coming back in the same way.
Georgetown University found of all the jobs created since the Great Recession – 11.6 million – 73 percent require a college degree. In this country, about 34 percent [of the population] has a college degree – talk about a skills gap.
Kate A. Greene, RWU’s director of international program development, said RWU “strives to be the university the world needs now.” What type of university does the world need now?
That is our aspirational goal … it means we need to be relevant.
The larger issue is how to convince the skeptical public … about the value of higher education, especially, apparently, for Republicans.
If the only relevance we have is to our current student population – fairly high-achieving suburban, relatively affluent, white kids, who have been our primary group for the last 40 to 50 years – and that’s not who we’re seeing in the pipeline, what changes do we have to make to be equally successful for today’s population of first-generation people of color?
We know we’re playing catch-up, but we can’t say we’re going to give them the same opportunity we gave other people and hope it will work when we know [it won’t]. … We have to be deliberate in … making accommodations to be relevant to this population of people.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is talking about pursuing reverse discrimination in higher education, how do you think that will play out in universities across the U.S.?
Symbolically, this is hugely important because it acknowledges we have not yet succeeded in leveling the playing field.
I suspect colleges are going to use a surrogate way of getting at this by using income as a test. We’ll give a preference to first-generation, low-income students who happen to be disproportionately, but not exclusively, members of underrepresented minority groups.
I don’t think it’s going to be hugely impactful on the actual distribution of students on college campuses. … It’s only going to affect the top schools that are rejecting more than half of their applicants. Most schools are accepting all qualified applicants.
But it says, as an American society, we no longer need to think in terms of providing additional support for people of color because we are, after all, born equal … conveniently ignoring we [are] not equal in terms of wealth, family income, family history or any of the rest of it – a fiction Sessions would have us believe is true.
This past summer, RWU further invested in its diversification effort by hiring Ame Lambert as the school’s first-ever chief diversity officer. How will her presence further the school’s diversification of its faculty and student body?
[Lambert] reports directly to me, sits in the president’s cabinet, isn’t buried midway through student affairs and is my right-hand adviser on diversity issues.
She is … working with a program that will be taken initially by the senior leadership of the university, to better understand multicultural awareness. [The] course will meet every other week for two and a half hours for the semester and will continue to spread through the university. Her role is to help formulate conversations, educational programs and policies designed to support increasing numbers of students from underrepresented groups. She’s also going to be a sounding board and resource for minority kids, somebody to talk to, someone who has been through this process.
The admissions part is the easiest part, the hard part is creating the supportive environment – and that means bringing people up to speed in terms of people’s needs and expectations to be successful.
How have directives and messaging from the Trump administration impacted the school’s efforts to diversify?
We can’t put fundamental values in the whims of politicians.
[These actions] force me to be declarative about our values over and over again. … As [President Donald] Trump was sworn into office, I made a statement to the community saying … ‘We’re not going to make it easy for anybody to do this. You’re part of our community, we’re going to support you.’
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UPHILL BATTLE: Despite facing challenges such as a decline in international student population and international concerns that the United States is not as welcoming as it once was, Roger Williams University President Donald J. Farish says the school is working hard to diversify its population through measures such as providing full-ride scholarships to displaced Syrian students and hiring a chief diversity officer. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY[/caption]
Everything is in question right now and it’s important universities articulate their values and leave no doubt in people’s minds whether they’re blowing in the political winds or independent.
Does the higher education community feel threatened by what some see as anti-minority messaging from some politicians in Washington?
I absolutely think higher education institutions feel threatened by what is being said in Washington. With the emphasis being placed on [job] training, as opposed to education … the whole funding process of higher education may be in jeopardy. What’s going to stay and what’s going to disappear? What’s going to happen to Pell Grants and Stafford loans?
How do you see the anti-immigration, anti-diversity messaging some see coming from Washington impacting the direction of higher education in this country?
There’s a lot of anxiety in higher education about willful actions taken in Washington, D.C., that will have long-term, deleterious impacts on the world of higher education.
These are things we’ve been through before, but to put [progress] in reverse and go back to an earlier era is clearly going to impact students, which will in turn impact [diversity] on particular college campuses at a time when demographics in the Midwest and New England are such that campuses are struggling mightily to stay open.
I wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education [in November 2016, called] “The Specific Threats Now Facing Higher Education,” identifying 13 concerns with the Trump administration. I [recently] looked at that and was startled to see [more than] half are happening and the other half seem to be happening. It’s a scary situation.
There’s the sense we are not together as a society … [and] it’s important the higher education [community] not be drawn into partisan battles, but look at [messaging from and actions taken in Washington] as either helpful or harmful long-term.
