Letter:Caldera fails to educate, puts UNM's image first

Editor,

I am concerned with President Caldera's characterization of the problem facing the University of New Mexico.

I never graduated from high school. I scrambled from humble community-college beginnings to ultimately receive a highly competitive fellowship at UNM's Latin American and Iberian Institute, and for the past several semesters have taught precisely the student population at issue in the Daily Lobo's story on the proposed stiffening of UNM admissions criteria. I am also involved in studying the disproportionate number of women and minorities who leave computer science and engineering programs before graduating.

First, Caldera's plan to raise the bar - that is, to change admissions requirements in order to boost graduation rates and make UNM appear more educationally successful overall - is just statistical sleight of hand. It's a clever way to avoid the challenge of successfully educating students from a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, which in turn produce an unusually broad range of relative preparedness.

Second, UNM's options are not limited to either continuing to do a poor job of serving certain segments of the state's aspiring college graduates, or choosing not to serve them at all by requiring TVI to function as a kind of state-subsidized special-ed program. An alternative solution that has become a refrain in the literature on the hemorrhaging of women and certain minorities from computer science programs is to change the mission of undergraduate education to learning, instead of defaulting to the traditional, sink-or-swim environment in which success requires a socioeconomic preparatory advantage - which just happens to correspond strongly to being white and middle-class.

There are dozens of relatively straightforward ways to use existing technology to improve the immediacy and quality of contact between students and UNM's early intervention programs, which could be one important part of the solution. But a much more significant part - improving the quality and quantity of professor-to-student interaction, which the mass of scholarly literature overwhelmingly recommends - would require a sea change in the prevailing notions of universities' public-service function.

This, in turn, would require fundamental changes in both the attitudes of professors and in resource allocation, with freshman and sophomore education getting substantially more than they have traditionally received.

Bottom line? It's time to fess up. The root of UNM's failure to serve all New Mexicans is not some hopelessly complex, administrative and logistical quandary. It is simply a lack of imagination linked to an unwillingness to reorient ourselves, as academic institutions, to an overarching ethic of community service. Like too many universities, UNM is failing - or refusing - to put undergraduates, and education for its own sake, first.

Joel M. Young

UNM staff