Advertisement In that same 10 years, UW-Madison has made news for photoshopping a photo of a black student into a crowd of white students on a brochure and for a law school professor's remarks about the Hmong that some considered racist.
Now in the plan's final year, the numbers of minorities at the state's flagship have been stubbornly budging upward, but students and administrators say there is still more work to be done, especially when it comes to creating a welcoming campus environment for people of color.
"I think there's room for improvement everywhere," said incoming chancellor Biddy Martin. "We're probably going to have to, as most universities are, get much more aggressive in some of our efforts."
It's difficult to declare the program a success or failure because its goals lacked specificity.
In part paralyzed by legal restrictions, the only numeric goal was that the diversity of the freshman class match the diversity of the state's high school graduates. That benchmark was met in the first year of the program, 1998, and in every subsequent year.
Bernice Durand, the former head of diversity programs on campus, said she is looking for the day when students of color are getting admitted, performing and graduating at the same rate as white students.
"When students of color are doing as well as white students, you'll feel like you've got equal opportunity," she said. "No, we're not there."
There were seven goals to the plan when it was hatched 10 years ago, and with the more tangible of those goals, the results are mixed:
The percentage of black, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic students has increased in the past 10 years, but it is still a small part of the undergraduate student population at UW-Madison, just 12 percent of almost 30,000 students. That's up from around 9 percent in 1998.
A profile of the incoming freshman class will not be available until Sept. 1, but preliminary numbers suggest the percent of minorities will be similar to last year, Farrell said.
The minority graduation rate is inching up, but it's still not as strong as the graduation rate for white students. For the freshman class of 2001, 59.3 percent of minorities had graduated by six years, compared to 80.1 percent for the total class.
The number of faculty and staff of color has also increased. The numbers of black, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic faculty have increased from about 10 percent to 16 percent, but the number of academic staff hovers around 11 percent.
The world many Wisconsin students will enter as adults will likely be far more diverse than the one they left behind.
"It's certainly critical to the experience of every individual student to have other students in his or her midst from very different backgrounds," Martin said. "It's an essential part of every student's education. It's also essential to the state. The state needs to be invested in having its young people learn and grow up in a diverse environment."
It takes time
Administrators say change takes time. They know they need to reach students of color earlier, indoctrinating the dream of college into them at a young age. But the relatively homogenous population of the state of Wisconsin is a limiting factor.
The major pipeline program that the university instituted in 1999, PEOPLE (Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence), is just now beginning to hit full flow.
Ashley Brown was in sixth grade at Madison's Jefferson Middle School when she joined the PEOPLE program as part of its inaugural middle school class. She spent her summers on the UW-Madison campus, staying in dorms and attending classes.
After graduating from Madison Memorial High School in 2006, she hauled her luggage into Witte Hall and faced the transition to college like thousands of other freshman.
Yet the path was not as smooth as she had hoped.
She looked around her introductory classes and sometimes realized she was the only black student.
"For a long time, I used to feel very inferior on campus," she said. "Sitting in a classroom of 500 white students, I was one pea in a pod of people that didn't look like me."
Brown, who is entering her junior year as a journalism major, found solace in the PEOPLE program, where she met mentors and received support from other students of color.
But she still meets people who think she got into the university only because of her race. PEOPLE scholars get a scholarship that pays for tuition, but they must be admitted to UW-Madison on their own merits, fulfilling its rigorous admissions standards.
People say, "you're in one of those minority programs where you go for free," Brown said. "I tell them, Oh no. I worked all the way from sixth grade on to college.'"
What next?
This year marks the end of Plan 2008, and it is not clear where the program will go next.
UW-Madison is on the cusp of some potentially big changes in its diversity portfolio. Starting this school year is both a new chancellor, Martin, and a new administrator, Damon Williams, the incoming vice provost for climate and diversity.
Martin said it's too early to say where the plan should go next.
"I think it means data gathering about what has worked and what hasn't worked so well," she said. "And it might mean making the hard decisions to reallocate funds to different programs and try some new strategies."
Provost Pat Farrell said he would like to see more ways to measure success. The goals of Plan 2008 were vague, only generally seeking an increase in minorities. Without slapping exact numbers on the program, he thinks there may be a better way to determine whether they are building a more diverse campus and climate.
There are areas to improve, like continuing to build pipeline programs that feed good students into UW-Madison.
"The numbers of students we see at the middle school level and the numbers of students we see applying here are somewhat different," said Farrell said. "So students make other choices along the way."
One thing he isn't interested in is putting another deadline on the next program, calling it an ongoing challenge.
Jairuf Shaw, a rising sophomore and a PEOPLE scholar, said in terms of making students of color feel comfortable, "Wisconsin still has a long way to go."
But it won't dissuade the Milwaukee native from his goal of graduating in 2011.
"For me, I know I have what it takes to succeed and I know I'll finish," he said.
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