At colleges, immigrants are `minorities’ too

At colleges, immigrants are `minorities’ too
The Chicago Tribune
Clarence Page
July 7, 2004

Smiles turned to tightened jaws at the most recent reunion of Harvard University’s black alumni.

The mood shift, as reported recently in The New York Times, occurred when two very prominent black faculty members reported encouraging increases in Harvard’s black enrollment, then raised questions as to where those new black students were coming from.

Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, reported that 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates are black, but somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of them are “West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.”

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