One Incident...

There is undoubtedly concern among prospective students about the preliminary Kiltgaard report, about the death threats against last year's president of the Black Students Association, and about the reputation Boston has for racial violence, David L. Evans, a senior admissions officer who works with minority applicants, says. But when they consider their options, Evans adds, they often find similar problems on other campuses.

For example, race-related problems have had very visible results at Amherst and Williams, both small, highly selective, northeastern schools. After a cross-burning occurred at Williams College last fall, admissions officials there saw Black applications drop significantly. Only 100 Blacks applied for their class of '85, compared with 170 for the previous class. Some Blacks even pulled out of their supposedly binding early-decision contracts. Philip Smith, director of admissions at Williams, attributes the declines to "the massive publicity surrounding the cross-burning." The press often covered the situation inaccurately, Smith says, citing one example where a newspaper ran big headlines saying that Williams classes had been cancelled for three days as a result of the incident, when in fact there had only been a two-hour voluntary moratorium one morning.

Aside from media hype, though, there was a very real, very strong campus response to the cross-burning, Smith says, adding that students, faculty members and administrators united against the atrocity. Admissions officials expanded their visits to big cities, encouraged students to visit the campus, and tried to contact minority students individually to ease their concerns.

Apparently they were fairly successful; the yield (the percentage of students accepting their offers of admission) for Blacks admitted in April was actually a bit higher than the yield for the previous year. "I suspect the problem will fizzle out, since the publicity is down." Smith adds.

The events at Williams virtually mirrored those which had taken place the year before at Amherst College. Before a cross-burning occurred there in 1979, Amherst was accustomed to enrolling between 25 and 30 Black students in each class (the class size at Amherst is about 385). After the incident, the figure dropped to 13 in the class of '84.

Like Williams, Amherst eventually began again to attract its customary number of minority students. Amy Johnson, an Amherst admissions officer, says the college's admissions staff informed secondary-school counselors of Amherst's interest in Blacks and used the College Board's student search much more extensively than before. Those efforts, along with active involvement by Amherst's Black students, helped bring the number of Blacks back up to 27 for the Class of '85, she says.

Race-related incidents at Cornell don't seem to have affected that school's minority admissions nearly as severely as they did at Amherst and Williams. Last fall, after some threats of violence against Blacks and a robbery from Ujamaa Hall, a Black studies house, the university made a strong and apparently effective statement to show people that such events would not be tolerated, James Scannell, Cornell's dean of admissions and financial aid, says. The racial incidents neither elicited substantial concern from Black applicants nor affected the number of Blacks applying for and enrolling in Cornell's class of '85, according to Scannell.

The Williams admissions director points out that race-related controversy there resulted from just "one quick incident." But it is clear that a single incident can strongly affect a campus, damage years of an admissions office's initiatives in minority recruiting, and require substantial effort from all concerned to restore the school's minority representation.