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A College of Minnesota regent is drawing fireplace after asking in a public assembly whether or not one of many system’s campuses is “too numerous.”
Steven A. Sviggum, vice chair of the board, posed the query concerning the Morris campus throughout a board committee assembly final week.
“I’ve acquired a pair letters, two really, from pals whose kids usually are not going to go to Morris, as a result of it’s too numerous of a campus. They simply didn’t really feel comfy there,” Sviggum mentioned. “Is all of it potential, within the specifics of Morris, that we’ve grow to be too numerous for a scholar to attend?”
The remark got here amid a dialogue of declining enrollment on the Morris campus, which is roughly two-and-a-half hours from the system’s flagship Twin Cities campus. Morris enrolled 1,024 undergraduates this fall, a 14-percent decline from a 12 months in the past. That quantity additionally marks a 44-percent drop in enrollment, in contrast with 2011-12, based on system information. (Whereas enrollment on the Twin Cities campus has been steady within the final decade, the system’s different regional complete campuses in Crookston and Duluth have seen declines, although none as profound as Morris’s.)
In the meantime, Sviggum instructed The Chronicle, the share of underrepresented college students at Morris has risen by about 40 p.c.
Whereas the share of American Indian, Asian, Black, and Hispanic undergraduates did enhance throughout that interval, their precise numbers fell — simply not as a lot because the variety of white college students did. To place it one other approach, the share of white college students amongst Morris’s undergraduate inhabitants fell from about two-thirds within the fall of 2012 to only over half in 2022. In the meantime, the share of non-white college students elevated due to the bigger general drop in headcount.
“I’m not making the connection” between declining enrollment and elevated range, Sviggum mentioned. “I simply merely requested the query,” he mentioned, including, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Any judgment concerning the potential correlation between range and enrollment, he mentioned, would must be balanced with an evaluation of tuition prices at Morris and at different close by campuses. “All the pieces must be introduced collectively in a stability.”
Whereas he’s not asserting {that a} correlation exists, Sviggum mentioned, “We’ve to no less than ask the query. I don’t assume there’s any program or any coverage, politically right or not, that’s above questioning within the public sphere.”
Janet Schrunk Ericksen, appearing chancellor of the Morris campus, responded to Sviggum within the assembly, saying that she’d not too long ago met with members of the campus’s Black Scholar Union. “I believe that they’d be shocked that anybody would assume our campus was too numerous,” she mentioned. “They definitely really feel, at occasions, remoted the place they’re positioned. So the reply is from that perspective, no.” She added that complaints that Morris’s range would make the campus really feel uncomfortable “would shock me.”
“I may present you the letters,” Sviggum instructed Ericksen. (Requested by The Chronicle if he may share the letters, Sviggum mentioned they have been despatched over a 12 months in the past and that he not had them. If he did, he mentioned, he wouldn’t share them to be able to protect confidentiality.)
‘Our range is a power’
A Morris spokesperson mentioned that Ericksen was out of the workplace and never accessible to remark.
Kendall J. Powell, board chair, mentioned in a press release that Ericksen’s feedback in the course of the assembly “strongly resonate with me.”
“Our range is a power, it creates alternative, and it opens the door for a lot of extra who’ve been traditionally excluded from the financial and different advantages of upper schooling,” Powell wrote. “This Board has been a robust supporter of the range efforts of this administration, whether or not in employment or scholar enrollment.”
Additionally difficult Sviggum’s remarks in the course of the assembly was fellow regent Darrin M. Rosha. “I’d be fairly stunned {that a} scholar would have a reputable concern about feeling by some means misplaced,” Rosha mentioned, describing Morris as a “closely white neighborhood.” (In accordance with U.S. Census information, the town of Morris is 86.8 p.c white.) “However even when they do,” Rosha continued, “I can actually consider no higher expertise than for them to be in a closely numerous neighborhood, to grasp that that shouldn’t matter and they need to really feel welcome.”
Dylan Younger, president of the Morris Campus Scholar Affiliation, instructed KSTP that minority scholar teams he’d spoken to have been “outraged” by Sviggum’s remarks. “My preliminary response is to query, What does ‘too numerous’ imply? What proportion of the scholar physique can we attain earlier than we resolve it’s too numerous?” he instructed the station.
Sviggum, a Republican and former speaker of the Minnesota Home of Representatives, acknowledged a number of occasions in the course of the assembly that his remarks may put him “on skinny ice.” However, he mentioned, “I wanted to say it, and I’ve the liberty to have the ability to accomplish that.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, he mentioned that he helps DEI efforts within the system and that his query wasn’t supposed to impugn them. “People who inferred that within the query, I’m sorry for that. However that’s different folks’s inferring, not feedback or statements that I made,” Sviggum mentioned. Nor, he added, was the query supposed to be racist.
The “ruckus” his remarks have brought on, Sviggum mentioned, “is indicative of the extremism that exists inside our society.”
Audrey Williams June contributed to this report.
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