"Black, white leaders set weekend meeting," January 30, 1974

Jeff Watkins, "Black, white leaders set weekend meeting," Technician, January 30, 1974.

Student leaders and members of the faculty and administration will attend the Student Affairs of Human Relations Conference at Quail Roost this weekend.

The goals of the conference are to discuss problem areas between black and white students and to develop means of improving understanding and communication between the two races.

“I’m very optimistic about the conference,” said John Poole, Dean of Student Development, “if for no other reason than it gets people together outside the campus setting, and they get to know each other better. It changes the whole perspective.”

Assistant Dean of Student Development Don Solomon, who originally perceived the idea of a conference between students and administration officials in a casual atmosphere, explained the events leading up to the conference.

“All the matters to fight over, like the print shop, Pan African Festival – I felt these problems, while they are important – showed an inability for students to come up with productive solutions. This indicated to me that the problems were not insurmountable, but the people were not communicating effectively. There was a lack of willingness to sit down and talk about these things.”

Of the twenty black and white students scheduled to attend, only Student Center president Brenda Harrison has withdrawn from the meeting, citing personal reasons as the cause. Solomon also noted that Harrison, Technician editor Beverly Privette, and WKNC-FM station manager Don Byrnes failed to attend most of the preliminary meetings held in relation to the conference.
“Any questions they had concerning the setup of the meeting could have been discussed then,” he said.

The weekned conference is being conducted by the General Assistance Center for Educational Development at St. Augustines College.

“There is no agenda for this,” Poole said. “We’ll just discuss what areas we need to turn out attention to; such as lack of communication and trust between blacks and whites, and between the administration and students.

“We’ll discuss the enrollment of black students, and what the university is doing to increase black student enrollment and to attract black professional staff members.”