A Pale Campus

A Pale Campus

This series of articles on diversity appeared in The Nubian Message, North Carolina State University's African-American student newspaper, which was first published on November 30, 1992.

In this two-part series, Terry does not launch into a polemic denunciating university admissions policies, but instead focuses on the difficulties faced by NCSU in retaining African-American students. In both Part One and Part Two, Terry promotes the efforts of the African-American Student Affairs Office to help black "students overcome feelings of 'alienation and social isolation' at State." As a complement to the article on a town hall concerning campus apathy, Terry's series emphasizes the usefulness of African-American campus institutions in enhancing the social lives and academic careers of black students at N.C. State. Whereas many other articles in the Message encourage affirmative action policies, Terry's takes a different angle, pointing out the need to both admit and retain more African-American students at NCSU.

Kim Terry, Staff Writer

Kim Terry, "A Pale Campus," The Nubian Message 8, no. 2 (September 14, 2000), 1. Digitized by the Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.

2000-09-14

Madison W. Cates

English

document

According to admissions, 435 African-American students were admitted to N.C. State University this semester. For the 3,757 new freshmen at NCSU, only 393 were African-American.

The most recent statistics at NCSU shows that the black student population makes up approximately 9.5% of the student body. From 1995-1999 the graduation rate of that 9.5% has not exceeded 7.0%.

What happened to that 2.5% of the students who entered State with hopes, ideas and dreams of graduating? Does N.C. State really care?

Tracey Ray, coordinator for African-American student affairs at NCSU states, “the help is definatly [sic.] here for African-American students but it’s up to the students to go after it.” Ray believes that State has made a lot of effort to make sure African-American students feel connected.

Competition amoung [sic.] universities has increased. In order to keep up, NCSU has created the Chancellors Leadership Scholarship. It is composed of a $2500 scholarship, renewed each year as long as students maintain a 3.5 GPA. The African-American symposium for incoming freshmon [sic.] is also an excellent way to prepare new students for campus life at NCSU.

“Other institutions have actually contacted me wanting to know how we put the symposium together,” Ray said.

In addition to these two programs designed to attract African-American students to State, there are other programs geared towards helping students with comeptative [sic.] GPA’s to remain at State throughout their college career and graduate.

In order to help first year African-American students overcome feelings of “alienation and social isolation” at State the African-American Student Affairs office started the Peer Mentor program in 1980. These mentors act as big brother or big sister to first year students, they share information with them about policies and resources for them on campus and maintain regular contact with students to make sure they are adjusting to campus life.

A new program that is now up and running through the office of African-American student affairs is SABA. This is a tutorial program geared to empower students and develop their skills for academic success. SABA is not only focused toward helping students having academic difficulty but also towards helping students to maintain a high GPA. The counselors of SABA help students with their educational, professional, and cultural aspects of [t]heir lives.

These are only a few of the programs for African-American students that NCSU is offering. The next question is whether or not students are using all of their avenues in order to succeed at NCSU.

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