The tough sell - James Hill, University of Texas

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The tough sell - James Hill, University of Texas - Cover Story
By Lydia Lum
Jul 15, 2007, 05:56

With the appointment of its first African American vice president, the University of Texas tries to overcome its legacy of minority exclusion

When James Hill graduated salutatorrian from a segregated Austin high school in 1945, attending the University of Texas (UT) was not an option. Back then, the university didn't admit Black students.

The irony that he became the university's first African American vice president earlier this year is not lost on Dr. Hill. And the appointment comes at a time when a court-imposed ban on affirmative action programs in that state has sent the enrollment of African Americans and Chicanos/Latinos plummeting.

"To not [have been] able to get admitted here [as an undergraduate], but to now be an officer is quite an accomplishment for me," says Hill, a lifelong jazz fan whose new office displays paintings of John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong on its walls. The vice president's chatty, grandfatherly manner attracts smiles from colleagues as well as strangers.

Top UT officials insist Hill's appointment wasn't tokenism.

They say the forty-five-year veteran educator, who most recently was an associate vice president at the university, was simply the best qualified for the job.

"I would have recommended him if he had been White," says Dr. Edwin R. Sharpe, vice chancellor for academic affairs of the UT System.

"It isn't tokenism at all. That's the furthest thing from the truth."

Sharpe and others acknowledge that skeptics may dwell on the fact that 115 years passed at UT before an African American was named vice president. However, they say that minorities can have successful careers at predominantly White schools such as UT. And they say they hope Hill's promotion helps reverse some of the image problems UT has had since the 1996 Hopwood court ruling against affirmative action.

"The university is committed to serving all people of Texas, of all ethnicities," Sharpe says. "All voices should be at the table. It is entirely appropriate to have a ranking vice president who is African American."

The seventy-year-old Hill, who has been married for forty-eight years and has a grown daughter, said he has not retired yet because he wants to "make things better here; to show the world that the door is open here--especially for minority students and employees.

"I can make a contribution. I can show people that the environment here is not one of Lino Graglia," he says, referring to the controversial UT law professor who sparked protests a year ago when he said that minorities cannot compete academically with Whites.

Hill, who earned master's and doctorate degrees from UT after it desegregated, is one of President Larry Faulkner's eight vice presidents. Each of these administrators oversee budgets ranging from less than $1 million to more than $200 million.

As vice president for human resources and community relations, Hill oversees a $14 million budget and more than 170 employees in eight divisions. His areas of oversight include personnel, UT initiatives at public schools, and the university's equal employment opportunity and affirmative action office.

The Early Years

Hill's new role is a stark contrast to where he started in his relationship with the university more than fifty years ago.

A native of Austin, Hill is the second-youngest of his parent's five offspring. His mother was a homemaker whose primary responsibility was rearing the children, while his father worked in a railyard and swept streets.

Although neither of his parents were educated beyond grade school, Hill recalls, "It was always assumed we kids would go to college."

After graduating second in his high school class of thirty-four students, Hill attended the historically Black Huston-Tillotson College two blocks from his east Austin home. His older siblings had attended there, and the band director recruited him to play trombone. A music scholarship paid nearly all his expenses, and he even picked up a few extra dollars performing at dances and parties. He graduated in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in education.

Hill's first teaching job was in Abilene, West Texas at an all-Black high school where he also was band director. There, the principal recommended he pursue a master's degree and suggested UT. The university had formally desegregated in 1950 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt v. Painter that plaintiff Heman Sweatt and other African Americans should gain admission to UT law school because Texas's Black schools were not of equal caliber.

African Americans were enrolled in not only the law school, but also trickled into UT graduate programs. But when Hill enrolled at UT in the summer of 1959, social barriers still existed on campus. On his first day, his statistics professor had some sobering words for the sole African American in the class.

"He said to me, `The university doesn't want you here, and I don't want you here,'" Hill recounts. "That was my orientation to UT and my coming back home to Austin. "

The furious, but determined, Hill earned a "B" in that class. He attended school during the summer and taught in West Texas the rest of the year, finishing his master's degree in educational psychology in 1962.

Hill made the transition from a career in teaching to higher education administration while at the Texas Education Agency, which oversees all public schools in the state. For four years, he was field office director for the Educational Testing Service in Austin. It was during this period that he earned a doctorate in educational administration from UT.

He also was active in UT's African American alumni group. Through that group, as well as his career path in public education, he became acquainted with high-ranking UT officials such as Sharpe.

In 1993, Sharpe recruited Hill to the university to work under him as associate vice president for administration. Hill's performance in that position and the relationship the two men cultivated during that time are what motivated the vice chancellor to recommend Hill for the vice presidency to then-incoming President Faulkner. Faulkner assumed the presidency this past April.

The University's Image Problem

One of the largest campuses in the country, UT enrolls more than 48,000 students. About 4 percent are African American, and 13 percent are Latino.

In 1989, only 2 percent of UT's more than 2,100 teaching faculty were African American, and 3 percent were Latino, according to UT statistics. Like many other predominantly White schools, even with affirmative action, UT had struggled to hire underrepresented faculty of color.

Hill recalls his shock when he learned the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had decided in favor of plaintiff Cheryl Hopwood and three other White students who had sued UT law school after being denied admission claiming reverse discrimination. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court let the Hopwood ruling stand.

By 1997--a year after the Hopwood ruling--African American faculty had inched to 3 percent and Chicano/Latino faculty to 5 percent.

African American employees on campus had lobbied for someone like Hill to be named a vice president, and not just be in charge of minority affairs. Members of UT's African American Staff Advocating Progress (AASAP) submitted a proposal in 1996.

"We realize the need to hold administrative cost to a minimum," the proposal stated. "[But] we feel this appointment is timely and necessary to make our public pronouncements for diversity consistent with our actions."

While UT's minority faculty numbers have held steady, minority enrollment has dropped since 1996--especially at the law school. UT is appealing the Hopwood case again on different legal arguments after a federal judge earlier this year ordered UT not to use racial preferences in admissions.

Since joining the administration at UT, Hill has not personally experienced the type of overt racism he encountered as a graduate student in 1959. He therefore finds it unfortunate that the Hopwood incident has cast the university in such an unflattering light.

"It's only a misperception that minorities aren't welcome here," he says. "A lot of people didn't have very good feelings for the university in the first place. ... Here I am trying to sell the university and now we have this [Hopwood] baggage to go along with it."

While Hill insists minority faculty careers at UT weren't hurt by Hopwood, he concedes that recruitment of new underrepresented faculty of color is harder now.

"They are not anxious to come to Texas," he says. "They want to know what we're doing in Texas to make minorities feel welcome. It's an image problem."

The Importance of the Promotion

Hill contends that UT's minority staff are paid much less than Whites, although neither he nor the university had records to substantiate this claim.

The vice president characterizes himself a "staunch supporter" of affirmative action. However, in his interview with Black Issues, he did not readily share his ideas of how to diversify UT without considering race. Thanks to Hopwood, UT no longer has programs or funds earmarked for minority faculty recruitment.

Hill's track record in diversifying UT has been mixed. His previous job responsibilities have never outright called for him to recruit scholars of color, although his high visibility at national conventions and meetings sometimes presents opportunities for him to informally recruit and network with prospective faculty and staff. Occasionally, a colleague also may enlist his help to persuade a minority job candidate that UT is a hospitable environment.

In addition to his participation in UT's African American alumni group, Hill has been chairman of the university's affirmative action committee and the African American community relations committee. He also has chaired UT's Heman Sweatt Civil Rights Committee, which annually plans an African American-themed symposium annually, and UT's Martin Luther King statue committee, which worked to get a statue of King erected next year on a campus that has several Confederate hero statues.

Dr. Reginald Wilson, an expert on minorities in higher education, and a visiting professor at UT, calls Hill's promotion heartening. Nationally, African Americans make up only 7 percent of administrators and less than 5 percent of all faculty, says the senior scholar emeritus of the American Council for Education.

Because African Americans have only had a few decades to make their mark on predominantly White institutions, most who hold administrative posts are deans and assistant vice presidents, Wilson says. And many of them, he points out, are concentrated in minority affairs, rather than in broader areas.

"Even if [Hill's] appointment was tokenism, it was tokenism with a positive spin," Wilson says.

AASAP's president, Patricia Parker, also praised Hill's appointment, which occurred without coaxing from her group.

"People working here need to see that kind of promotion and so does the community," says Parker, assistant director for admissions. "At least the university is trying to move forward."

That's part of the message that Faulkner hopes Hill will tell faculty and administrators outside Texas.

"It's helpful that there's African American participation here," Faulkner said. "It says something about what UT has be come and what it stands for."