April 26, 1995 Contact: Barbara McKenna (408/459-2495)

FOUNDING UC SANTA CRUZ PROVOST TO DISCUSS IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION AS PART OF CHANCELLOR'S SEMINAR SERIES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--In recent years, there has been a growing recognition in many institutions of the value in promoting ethnic, gender, and other forms of diversity. But diversity is more than a recent concern for sociologist Herman Blake, who has devoted much of his 30-year career to fostering and advancing diversity in higher education. Blake will discuss diversity and its fundamental importance to institutional quality in a free public lecture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on May 8 at 7:30 p.m. in Classroom Unit 1.

Blake is founding provost of Oakes College at UCSC, where he was a member of the sociology faculty for eighteen years. Since leaving UCSC in 1984, he has held the positions of president at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and currently, professor of sociology, anthropology, and education and vice chancellor for undergraduate education at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. "My focus over the past 30 years has been the same," Blake says. "Within all the different venues--Santa Cruz, an historically black college, an elite private school, and an urban university--I have found that there is a creative consequence to generating and supporting diversity."

"Herman doesn't regard diversity as a problem; he sees opportunities in diversity," says Donald Rothman, a longtime colleague of Blake's who is acting provost of Oakes College and a senior lecturer in writing at UCSC. "He is interested in discovering the strengths and intelligence that will emerge from cultural, class, and racial diversity. The broader wisdom that we gain from that kind of interaction is clear to him."

Blake has gained widespread respect for accomplishments in promoting diversity and supporting underrepresented students. He has created community service programs, including the Cowell College Extramural Education and Community Services Program at UCSC; developed opportunities for students, faculty, and administrators of different racial and ethnic groups to communicate; and researched and written extensively on diversity and social change.

Blake's lecture is part of the Chancellor's Distinguished Seminar Series on Mission, Quality, and Diversity, established in the fall of 1993 by Chancellor Karl S. Pister and the Academic Senate. The quarterly seminars are the public part of a program in which prominent women and minorities spend a day with faculty and students to discuss how to improve the quality of higher education in the United States.

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