UMN regent criticized for asking if diversity to blame for low enrollment at Morris campus

Josh Verges, Pioneer Press
·4 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

A member of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents is under fire for suggesting the relatively high percentage of nonwhite students at the University of Minnesota-Morris could be hurting its efforts to grow enrollment.

After a presentation Thursday to the board’s mission fulfillment committee, Regent Steve Sviggum said diversity and inclusion are important, but asked, “Is it possible that at Morris we’ve become too diverse?”

The 71-year-old farmer from Kenyon and former speaker of the state House of Representatives said that sometime last year, he was contacted by two friends who told him their children weren’t attending Morris “because it is too diverse a campus; they didn’t feel comfortable there.”

In response, Janet Schrunk Ericksen, interim chancellor at Morris, said she recently met with members of the school’s Black Student Union and they would be “shocked that anyone would think our campus is too diverse. They certainly, at times, feel very isolated.”

Schrunk Ericksen added that nonwhites are “not yet the majority of students on our campus, so that it would not feel comfortable because it’s too diverse would surprise me.”

Morris is the most diverse of the U’s five campuses, with white students accounting for 54 percent of enrollment. The school’s largest minority group, at 32 percent, is American Indians, who get free tuition under a federal mandate related to the campus’s history as an Indian boarding school.

Morris Campus Student Association President Dylan Young, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, said the main reason he chose Morris is “I knew I was coming to a place where people share similar backgrounds.

“For every two students that say, ‘I’m not going to Morris because it’s too diverse, because I don’t feel comfortable there,’ there’s going to be 20 more students or 200 more students who say this is the place for me because this is a diverse and vibrant community,” he said.

Young sent Sviggum a letter Monday inviting him to campus to see how the diversity there is an asset; he said Sviggum accepted the invitation.

Both before and after asking his questions about diversity Thursday, Sviggum acknowledged he was stepping into sensitive territory.

“I’m on thin ice, I understand that,” he said. “At 72 years old, I say things I never would have even thought when I was 52, but it gives you a little freedom to do that.”

Sviggum did not back down from his comments in a WCCO Radio interview Monday morning.

“I was just asking a question,” he said. “I’m sorry some feel the question might be offensive, but it certainly was not. We need to find information and facts.”

ENROLLMENT PLUNGE

Enrollment at Morris has plunged from over 1,900 a decade ago to just 1,068 this fall. That decline is much greater than the 29 percent enrollment drop that all of the state’s colleges and universities have seen in that time.

In recent years, officials from the U’s outstate campuses have been drawing up new plans for boosting enrollment, but the coronavirus pandemic and strong job market have made that challenge even more difficult.

The U’s central office is sending the Morris, Crookston and Duluth campuses a combined $7.4 million in subsidies this school year to offset shortfalls in tuition.

Regent Darrin Rosha said Thursday that Morris once was the system’s “crown jewel” but seems to have suffered from the rising academic profile of the U’s Twin Cities campus following the 2005 closure of its General College, which enrolled underprepared students. Morris also struggles to compete with the aggressive recruitment of universities in the Dakotas.

As to the diversity question, Rosha said that while the Morris is diverse, the surrounding area remains heavily white — 85 percent in Stevens County, according to census data — so he’d be surprised if white students feel uncomfortable there.

The Board of Regents has made it a formal goal to grow each year the share of incoming freshmen who are Black, Indigenous or people of color. Systemwide, that number was 29 percent last year, up from 26 percent the previous year.

Given the steadily growing diversity of Minnesota’s high school graduating classes, Rosha said, “this clearly is the future of our enrollment.”

Young, the campus student president, said the enrollment problem at Morris is complex, but “diversity isn’t one of the problems. I think it’s one of the solutions.”

Related Articles