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Hello, Dr. Byrd. How's it going, Professor McDaniel? I'm doing well. It's Friday. I love some Friday.

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I have to say, it's a beautiful day outside, which I know that the students in the colleges are happy about. There's a, there's a big event tomorrow that I didn't remember was happening tomorrow until you reminded me, but I knew when I lived on campus, I definitely would have

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known the date for a certain race that occurs with bicycles. So... I feel like you try not to say what it is now in your post-magister period. Do you not speak the name of the race?

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Well, you know, let, let the reader understand, is kind of all I'll say about that. But I do think, I know this week is usually, there's lots of hijinks on, on campus in the lead up to that day. But I don't know, this could be an interesting historical question to go back

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and see, if April 1st has ever fallen in a week when there are already lots of pranks and jokes. So I'm curious to know if that conjunction has ever occurred. Noted, and maybe an issue for a future doc talk. Well, but here we are...

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We have guests today! That's right, that's right. And I think we have more important questions to consider on today's doc talk. I wanna welcome our audience members.

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I'm Caleb McDaniel, I'm one of the co-chairs, along with Alex Byrd, of Rice University's Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice, and we convene here every Friday, rain or shine, whether it's nice or not, on Zoom, to talk about some of the documents that task force researchers are examining as part of our task

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to explore and better understand the entanglement of Rice's history with the histories of racial injustice. And today we have some very special guests who are here with us to talk about part of the work the task force has been doing.

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Dr. Byrd, do you wanna introduce us to our guests? I will. We have; and I will introduce them first and foremost as members of the steering committee of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice; from the Office of Multicultural Community Relations, we have Ms.

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Jan West. From the Kinder Institute and the department of sociology, we have Dr. Ruth Lopez Turley. And also from the sociology department--oh no, Dr.

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Ecklund, I am going to forget the name, first I'm gonna introduce you as a member of the sociology department, but I'm gonna forget the exact name of the center that you run. Also the head of the Center for Religion and Public Life. How'd I do?

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Dr. Elaine Ecklund. It's not a center, it's an institute, but religion and public life, is it? Program, program Program, sorry.

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Distinctions about which only we academics care. It's a center in my mind. Well, we're really glad to have the three of you here and also to share with our audience that this dream team has been working together over the past months on a particular

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project of the task force having to do with surveying black alumni of the university about their experiences on campus. And so I want to turn it over to them to share with us a little bit about what they've learned in the work that they're still doing to analyze some of the surveys that they've

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conducted. So, Jan, can I turn it over to you to get us started? Yes, of course. So, first of all, I have to say that nothing happens by accident, and I've been fortunate to have two of the most wonderful professors at Rice as part of this project.

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They are experts in the field. We would have been lost and not able to do this without them, so thank you both, Dr. Ruth Lopez Turley and Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund.

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And so what I'm gonna share with you is kind of the fun part of why I think we have gotten to the point where we thought it was good to have something more formalized happen. So, first of all, I'm gonna share my screen. Did that work? I hope.

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Okay, alright. So, one of the things that I've discovered from being part of the task force is that history is a very complex issue. I often wonder if it should be more like "our story" than "history," because there are

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so many different perspectives to it. I have seen letters from administrators at Rice on previous doc talks, I've seen documents from Rice students, and I've also been amazed to see my name on some of those documents. And so you never really think of yourself as being part of history or being a

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history maker, but I guess we are all history makers. And the desire to document what has happened over time for black students at Rice is not unique to the campus itself. I think it's part of a black oral tradition.

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Sometimes if you go across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, if it's still called by that name, at the foot of the bridge, there is a plaque and it has a biblical quote, but it talks about documenting and looking at the stones, and when people ask who did this particular challenge, then they will see that there would be something for the legacy

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of future generations. And so I think that drives part of where we're going, we got to this point. But I'm gonna share some informal areas about how we've tried over the years to document the presence and experience of black students at Rice.

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So first of all, one of the things we wanna know is, who are we? And that should be a simple enough question, and in a way it is, but at Rice, it wasn't exactly, because until sometime in the '80s, we did not code or identify students by race in records, I guess, is the best way for me to explain my understanding of it.

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And so that was a challenge. But the answer to that challenge was really kind of a word of mouth or oral tradition. Because, I guess by 1971, one of our alums commented that there were about sixty of us. So therefore, putting together a list of black students was fairly, easy enough, and

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you could produce accurate results. You sit ten people down in a room, give them a sheet of paper, tell them to list all of the people that were their classmates. You cross-referenced the list, and you could pretty much come up with a pretty exact list.

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And so, in preparation for one of the next events that I'm going to talk about, I think we actually did that kind of thing, and we shared that information with the powers that be at Rice. We had some help from the university, because the alternative to that would have

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been to look at every transcript of every Rice alum who had ever attended, because Rice filed transcripts at that point in a vault, and it was alphabetical, not by decades. So you would have gone from 1912 to 1970 something to try to figure out who was who. And although there were no recordings on the records, there would have been maybe, in the

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South, the people who came from Dunbar High School, Lincoln High School, Phillis Wheatley, etc., etc. would have given you some indication. So that was not an exact science, but it was also part of the challenge and the desire to

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know who we are. So the next I think big step that we took towards looking at really reflecting on who we are and what our experiences were came about 25 years after black students had been admitted to Rice.

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So, November of 1990, during homecoming, the alumni office and black alumni, because there was not an official organization of black alumni, came together for a fantastic weekend. To my knowledge, it was the first time black alums had gathered from across the decades at a homecoming event, interestingly enough, and I couldn't find the invitation

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for that, there was some people that were familiar to doc talk, groupies I'll call them, the name Vernon Giles shows up in the pictures and on the invitation. Vernon had become Director of Admissions at SMU by that time, but he came down for this November 1990 gathering.

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Also, we had Dr. Linda Williams, who was by that time a professor well into her career and her accomplishments as a political science professor and mentor of grad students who were going into that field.

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Probably [...] remember at least one poignant picture of us standing around at the statue. I have to say that, probably tongue-in-cheek, we were like, oh, see, we're here, we've graduated, we've moved on, that kind of reflection. So the next area, and this is my first picture on the slide, was an event that

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was held in 2007, November 2007, so it might have been during homecoming, I can't remember. But we were celebrating 40 years of blacks in blue. And in this picture, I thought it was interesting that we were beginning to document the legacies of Rice.

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The picture is alumna Althea Jones Williams; her daughter, Amber Pickett; and her niece, and they're all black Rice alumni. And in fact, Brandi is on the board for the alumni office. Now, this event highlights why it's so important to document history.

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So it was held in 2007, and when the black alumni tried to put together additional future events, it was rather confusing because 2007 wasn't actually the 40th year of blacks in blue. It would have been 2006, unfortunately, because it was going to celebrate and engage

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both Linda Williams and Ted Henderson. It had to be moved. Linda became ill, subsequently died, and so the event was not held until 2007. But if you didn't know that and you were planning future activities and future events,

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we had to go through some head scratching to try to figure out what that would be, and that, that was a more structured event. It involved the university support for a conference that was day-long, I know for sure. It involved the community, Melanie Lawson was the emcee for the event, and there

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were intense discussions across years of the presence of black alums, the challenges they faced, and just a number of different topics that were important to be noticed. Noted, rather. And so from that point, we went on to our next project.

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So everyone remembers, if you were anywhere around the campus in 2012, that there was a lot of discussion and planning that led up to the celebration in 2012. And there was an intense meeting about, among the stakeholders who were interested in making sure that there were accurate inclusions of, of alumni of color,

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particularly one meeting where we looked at looking at how blacks at Rice had fared. And we were thinking of a creative way to make sure that that story was told. So the first thing that we did is we put together a committee of Rice alums who planned and brainstormed and wanted to document and celebrate the presence of blacks

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at Rice during the centennial. And so what evolved from that was a documentary, and the documentary was called Young, Gifted, and Black. Well, in order to have a documentary, you have to have some people participate.

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So the first informal, but maybe not really first, questionnaire, this is not a survey, the black alumni questionnaire, was sent out with the help of the alumni office and with our word of mouth. You tell one alum, and he tells ten more, etc. And this was designed not so much for analysis, but to determine who would be an

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interesting person to interview for the documentary. But you will begin to see the kinds of questions that were asked that show up over and over again. And I have permission from Regina Tippins, who was my roommate at Rice, and who

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frequently looks at doc talks on Friday. So this is her survey. And so we were interested in information about where the early, or any of the alumni, originated when they applied to Rice.

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At the time that early alumni applied, there was a 60/40 in-state, out-of-state, policy of admission, so many of the early black alumni came from Texas. We wanted to know that it changed over time. We also wanted to know how they fared at Rice, if they got graduate degrees, what

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kinds of involvement or activities were they in at Rice? And we were also trying to find out who's likely to talk a lot. So if you sent in a survey, a questionnaire rather, and you said yes, no, and you stayed strictly to the point, it is a guarantee that you were not fit to be in the video,

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because we wanted you to really share. The other thing is that we developed a matrix for having students involved and for having the alumni involved so that we could make a fairly even my balanced way of picking people to participate.

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We wanted to have students--or alumni who had been students from across the decades. We wanted to have alumni from various degree areas. We wanted to have, of course, male and female alumni, or alumni who were also able to give a really good idea of their accurate experiences.

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We didn't care so much about whether you had positive or negative things to say. We wanted you to be authentic and also just share the total picture. And I think that you will see that some of the challenges faced had to do with academic preparation. Some of them had to do with not understanding the resources available to them

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at the time that they were undergraduates, and some of the benefits were career opportunities. There was a pattern of a description of what people saw in their later lives after they had graduated, things that positioned them to be successful in their careers. All of the parties and receptions in Brown College that Regina had experienced

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prepared her for kind of the social side of corporate America. And she thought that that was a wonderful experience. So, and basically, she described her successes or achievements, and, and also acknowledging that being the first person of this, that, or the other, the only person in

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a class at Rice, prepared her for the corporate world. So from that, I guess we had somewhere around 150 responses to those questionnaires from alumni, from various areas. And what resulted was the documentary Young, Gifted, and Black: Reflections from Black

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Alumni at Rice. And this is a picture of the alums that were featured. And I have to tell you, this documentary was almost 90 minutes, but the good part was we continued to document the different phases of black life at Rice.

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So there were the initial admittees like Raymond Johnson, who was the first speaker, until in 2012, 2013, the very last alum that we included was Aurra Fellows. And it's interesting to see how these people have played out in the life of the black Rice community.

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We have a couple of Rice board members in this group. We have the first black person, female, to attend the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. We have this other familiar face right here, slightly different haircut, so we're documenting style.

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And Rice students who were scholar athletes at the time, an admissions person who may be very familiar to other alums, and just an array of people who were present to talk about their experiences at Rice. So if you don't have a copy of this, to the people who are in the audience, I would

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encourage you to either reach out to me or go to another interesting documentation of venue on the Rice website in the alumni office, because I actually think they have the video itself embedded in that. So we're seeing once again different ways that people are trying to include information

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about the presence and the experience. The next big event to handle this desire to document and, and discuss and etc., was the 50th celebration of black undergraduate life at Rice. It started out being an ARUBA event, but turned into being a year-long university

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event that included everybody. Looked at, started off with a wonderful panel in the fall, and also this article, these articles come from the Rice magazine, the alumni magazine that really documented information. It led to a search for Jacqueline McCauley.

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We knew where Charles Freeman was, unfortunately he was deceased by that time, but we did not know where Jacqueline was, and it took us a better part of that year to find her in Australia, and we were able to interview her and include in this issue of Rice magazine probably what is a documentation of her experiences at Rice.

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So that was very valuable. And then following--and these are additional articles talking about when the, the Alumni Association was started, etc., some other comments, so I highly recommend that. And finally, what we had, in 2018, I guess we were still on a mission to document, and

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this, as well as the documentary film, were a result of partnerships between ARUBA and between--which is the Association of Rice University Black Alumni--and Multicultural Community Relations and Public Affairs. It was an exhibit at the African American Library at the Gregory School, and it was

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from September 2018 to February 2019. And already, I think you may recognize a familiar face from some of our earlier discussions. This gentleman who was the trainer in athletics; and once again, Alex, Dr. Alex Byrd, the president of, one of the former presidents of ARUBA; Linda Williams;

00:23:25.650 - 00:23:44.550

celebrating graduating. And this exhibit also included workshops at the library in addition to the display. And in those workshops, I can remember us beginning to discuss some of the evolution of the black population at Rice from being primarily from Texas to being present.

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And if I'm getting over time, somebody can wave, because I can't figure out how to get back to the chat. But I guess basically there's an ongoing desire, there have been multiple informal ways, but what we really are looking at with the current black alumni survey was a structured, effective way of gathering data about climate at Rice.

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And so, I guess in closing, what I wanted to share is that some of the challenges that we've faced throughout this documentation gathering is the ability to find people. One joke that we made when we showed the documentary is that there were people who were upset because maybe they weren't included.

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One of the reasons why everybody couldn't be included was length, of course, the documentary was long enough, but because for whatever reasons, over time, when people graduated, we were not able to contact them. They didn't stay in contact with the alumni office.

00:24:47.160 - 00:25:10.530

And I can remember one other situation in which a president of the BSA did not show up on the list of black alums, but it was related to how she coded and identified herself in whatever recordkeeping methods there is for identifying Rice alumna, or alumni, by race.

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And so one thing that we know is that word of mouth helps. Even though Rice alums, black Rice alums, did receive notice through the alumni office, it took calling them individually to get them sometimes to respond, to let them know that their responses were going to be held anonymously and as private as possible.

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We also are finding out that the other way to encourage people to share is through oral history. So we encourage that even as part of the information that we share with alums when they were completing the official formal survey. So with that being said, I hope I haven't really just taken up too much time and I'll

00:26:05.070 - 00:26:32.570

pass it on. So I wanted to, as the, as part of this, this team, and I just wanted to acknowledge Jen West very, very publicly, who, Ruth and I have many a conversation about this, having Jan's institutional memory, experience, knowledge, and wisdom has been the key to

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conducting a survey of current, the current community of black alum at Rice University. So we wanna really acknowledge that the university is extremely fortunate to have Jan a part of our collection that we can call our own. So thank you, Jan.

00:26:52.310 - 00:27:18.050

This is, has been a really interesting process that I've been privileged to be part of, so I thought I'd just say for a couple of minutes why I think, as a sociologist, surveys can be important, and what they can do and what they can't do. So the work of the task force to some extent is very historical, and we are trying to,

00:27:18.110 - 00:27:40.220

and we have really two of the leading historians leading this task force, so we are very, very fortunate in that regard. So to document things about Rice University and William Marsh Rice as a person and the context of race and race relations and racial discrimination at Rice University is

00:27:40.220 - 00:28:03.950

very much a historical project, and in some ways is more objective, don't tell other survey researchers I'm saying this, but is in some ways actually a more objective process than doing a survey, because we are looking at documents that think that people actually wrote, in many cases oral histories of what people remember who were witness to

00:28:03.950 - 00:28:24.560

certain kinds of events, and there is a kind of objectivity about the record, although we know of course that very often historically certain voices are marginalized and left out, and so then it's our job in the discipline of history to really make sure that, to get the most accurate representation of what has occurred, that voices that were marginalized

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come to the fore. Surveys are a different kind of endeavor. Here, we're trying to figure out people's perceptions. So the kinds of questions that survey researchers ask very much are determined by

00:28:39.020 - 00:28:58.610

the survey researcher themselves. So we decide the questions, we decide what's important. What's really wonderful about surveys is they have as a goal to ask everyone the same question. And so they have a kind of comparability that other kinds of methods do

00:28:58.610 - 00:29:16.220

not, in that we're asking everyone the same questions, so we can figure out what everyone thinks about the same thing. They are often low on validity, because the researcher creates the categories, so we often don't know if we're representing what we think we are with our researcher-created

00:29:16.220 - 00:29:34.730

categories, but they're very good with comparability, and it's also relatively easy to get a very large number of people into a survey. So why am I giving you this little overview of survey research and what it is, like I would to an undergraduate class when I teach methods?

00:29:34.730 - 00:29:58.670

Well, it's because I think especially when studying issues of black identity, issues of race and racism, and feelings about things like a statue, those kinds of benefits and limitations of surveys become particularly important. So we spend a lot of time in creating the current survey that we did, that we did and

00:29:58.670 - 00:30:19.730

we're still very much in the process of analyzing, last year, to, to figure out if we were asking the right kinds of questions. And so, and if they were questions that would really resonate with a black alum of Rice University. So that's why someone like Jan West was so incredibly important to be on

00:30:19.730 - 00:30:38.330

this team, who's really lived the experience, who's been a Rice University student and now a senior staff member of Rice University, who's lived on the campus. And so there is a sense where folks who were part of the campus environment become incredibly important in figuring out and helping us know as researchers if we're

00:30:38.330 - 00:30:58.910

asking the right kinds of questions. The other thing that became very, very important in constructing our survey last year was to really get a sense that we were doing outreach to all of the alum that we could possibly, possibly connect with, and getting them to complete the survey, and we

00:30:58.910 - 00:31:18.740

did. Of course, for modern-day survey research, I think we--Ruth will talk about this a little bit in a minute--we did quite a good job of that, in part due to the collection of people, and especially to Jan, who did a lot of personal outreach to Rice alum to make sure that they were, felt like they could participate in the survey, and

00:31:18.740 - 00:31:40.640

they really understood that the survey is for them, or was for them, because it's wonderful to have these questions that you ask of everyone to have comparability, but if you don't get a representation, right, on your survey, then, that, what we call in the field, "non-respondent bias," who are you, whose voices are you leaving out?

00:31:41.060 - 00:31:58.910

Modern-day survey research is super limited, it's a great tool, I consider myself a survey researcher in part, but it is still quite limited. So a fantastic response rate--this is gonna be like a shock and awe statement to some of you on this call who don't do this for a living--but a great response rate would be

00:31:58.910 - 00:32:17.060

something like twenty percent, so it's very hard to get people to fill out surveys. So we were actually pretty pleased with the proportion of people who responded. We also, in our survey, did add in what we call a "qualitative portion." We asked people if they might like to be followed up to do interviews.

00:32:17.420 - 00:32:32.240

We haven't yet had the opportunity or time to do that research, so that may be another benefit of this survey. Thanks so much, and I will now turn it over to Ruth, who's just gonna tell us very briefly a little bit about the kind of mechanics of what we did for this particular

00:32:32.240 - 00:32:51.770

survey. Thanks, Jan and Elaine, and I'll just add very briefly about what we did, and, and basically we tried, in a nutshell, we tried to reach every single black alum at Rice, from Rice. So every single alum.

00:32:51.770 - 00:33:16.430

Now, obviously that's hard to do, especially in the earlier years, we discovered, and that's when Jan was especially important, and we actually use this as an opportunity not only to survey all black alumni, or all as far as we know, right, but also it was an opportunity to do some updating of our alumni lists and alumni information.

00:33:16.430 - 00:33:47.300

So it served two purposes, actually, but we reached out to 1,559 black alumni. And as Elaine mentioned earlier, a twenty percent response rate is considered to be pretty good, so we're proud to say that we actually reached a 34% response rate. Now, obviously, we would have liked it to be even higher, but, but 34% is considered to be

00:33:47.450 - 00:34:04.790

quite good for a survey of this type, and we're, we're thrilled that we were able to collect this information. The survey consisted of about 25 items focusing on racial climate at the time that they were at Rice.

00:34:04.970 - 00:34:29.000

So we see this as an opportunity to sort of document from their perspective what their experiences were like, good and bad, and to see how that has evolved over time at Rice. So this, this is, like Elaine said, a slightly different type of documentation than what historians typically do, but we thought this would be a great way to, to do so.

00:34:29.000 - 00:34:49.010

And the last thing I'll just say is that while we were doing this, we kept saying, or I'll just speak for myself, I kept saying, this is the first time we've done a survey of black alumni at Rice, and now we're not so sure that it was the very first. Of course, the historians kind of messed that up for us, and you might hear a little

00:34:49.010 - 00:35:12.140

bit more about that shortly from Caleb. But, but yeah, that, that, we're excited, even if it's not the very first, we're very excited to, to have collected this information from so many black alumni. And the main thing I'll end with is that we really hope that this information is used.

00:35:12.530 - 00:35:41.120

It's not just to know about the experiences of black alumni over the generations, but rather to use that information going forward to make sure that we as an institution are truly, truly doing, always improving, doing a great job of making sure that the educational experience and beyond of, of all our alumni, but especially our black alumni,

00:35:41.150 - 00:35:58.600

that that gets better at Rice and that we continue to use this information. Thank you so much, Dr. Lopez Turley, and thank you to Dr. Ecklund and Ms.

00:35:58.600 - 00:36:21.760

West as well for all of the work you've done, and not only for that kind of brief overview of the survey, but also that historical account of the history of these kinds of efforts at the university, which I think is really important for us to to get a sense of as well. I think a lot of times, institutional memories can be short, and, and

00:36:21.760 - 00:36:41.620

if we don't build on previous work and sort of document what's been done and what can be, what can be done to expand on that previous work, then we'll constantly find ourselves back at the, at the starting point, instead of accruing more information and putting it to use, as you said, Dr.

00:36:41.620 - 00:36:58.210

Turley, so thank you so much for that. I want to tell our audience that you can use the Q&A button if you'd like, at the bottom, to pose any questions to our guests we have here with us today, or in the chat. In the meantime, since you kind of alluded to this, Dr.

00:36:58.210 - 00:37:22.690

Turley, already, I wanted to share for our document for the second half of our, of our webinar, an archival find that actually was brought to us by another frequent guest on the doc talks, a postdoctoral research associate in the Woodson Research Center, Dr. Will Jones, who's been doing wonderful work assisting the task force in the archival

00:37:22.690 - 00:37:50.150

parts of its mission, and he sent to us this document that I'll pull up on my screen from 1996. And you can see at the top in a font that I think would be familiar to people who use word processors or desktop publishing software in the, in the 1990s, anyone here

00:37:50.150 - 00:38:08.990

remember Print Shop? I can, I can remember the dot matrix printers. This is a little bit past that, but you can see at the top, the title, "Black Alumni of Rice 1996 Survey Results." And this is, was found in a collection of papers

00:38:08.990 - 00:38:30.020

belonging to the assistant to the President of Rice, a long time assistant to multiple presidents at Rice named Carl McDowell. And so this is in the collection of papers that he kept, and this is, as you can see down at the bottom of the folder here in box 82, folder 10 of this particular collection.

00:38:30.020 - 00:38:56.480

And what what it appears to be, I'll just describe it for posterity, here, is a cover letter dated November 2nd, 1996, with a photograph of a building on campus, and then a brief letter signed by Dr. Karen L. Kossie, who, who was an alumna of the university herself, and in fact, her name

00:38:56.480 - 00:39:21.110

showed up earlier on one of the the Rice magazine features that Jan was sharing with us as, as one of the earliest or perhaps the earliest African American to receive a PhD in history, my home department here at Rice University. And at this time in 1996 on the cover letter, she was the visiting instructor of history at

00:39:21.110 - 00:39:43.730

Texas Southern University in 1996 and 1997. And she reports here that she's going to present a series of graphs showing results from a survey that was done of black graduates of Rice University. And one of the things that I noticed right away, given the conversation about response

00:39:43.730 - 00:40:03.110

rates, that, that you were both, Dr. Ecklund and Dr. Lopez Turley, telling us about, is that 619 black graduates of Rice University were apparently contacted via mail in February 1996 for something that Dr. Kossie called the Collection of Memories Project.

00:40:03.680 - 00:40:28.760

So I have a question in my mind about what that project was and where it fits on the timeline that, that Jan was laying out for us of different efforts to collect memories. But apparently, as part of this effort in 1996, in February and again in March, and finally in June, there were efforts to contact these 619 graduates by mail, and 84

00:40:28.760 - 00:40:53.240

of those 619 graduates responded to the request. And so what we have in this folder are some, again, very 1990s-style bar graphs that were prepared, I'm wondering, this probably would have been, Excel would have been available, I'm thinking, and Microsoft Windows was there, And so you can,

00:40:53.450 - 00:41:13.490

you can see that the results were placed into some software that would make it possible to display those results with, I won't say color-coded bar graphs, because this was a black and white printer, but the, the different bars are shaded in slightly different colors in order to show what the results were.

00:41:13.490 - 00:41:38.120

So on, on one of these on the first page, we learned some more information about the survey itself. At the bottom, it says that it was compiled and prepared by Karen Kossie, who at the time was an ABD, so still working on the PhD. "ABD" is, is sort of academics speak for "all but dissertation," was getting very close,

00:41:38.120 - 00:42:04.310

but was apparently, while still completing her degree, doing this work as a visiting instructor of history at Texas Southern, and did it, according to the copyright statement down here at the bottom of the page, for the Black Alumni Association of Rice University. And I'm guessing that that's probably why this survey is titled the Black Alumni of

00:42:04.310 - 00:42:21.710

Rice University Survey, the BARU Survey, in '96. And one of the questions, the very first question here, is kind of a general one. "My academic experience at Rice was excellent" is the statement that was presented to the respondents, and they were asked whether they strongly agreed with that

00:42:21.710 - 00:42:36.860

statement, strongly disagreed with it, or somewhere in the middle: agreed, somewhat agreed, or disagreed. And those are, those are basically the options, as we scroll through the rest of the survey that were given to all the respondents, you could either strongly agree

00:42:36.860 - 00:42:54.980

with the statement, agree, somewhat agree, or there were two disagree options, disagree or strongly disagree. And then the series of statements was presented. So you can see with the first question I mentioned that 35 of the 84 responded that

00:42:54.980 - 00:43:11.690

they agreed that their academic experience at Rice was excellent. But then on the second question, opportunities for social growth were varied and numerous. There's a different pattern of response, where most of the responses disagreed with that statement.

00:43:11.690 - 00:43:31.130

32 disagreed with that statement. And there's a, there's a lot of questions on, on the survey that you could probably, wouldn't surprise our team, given the questions that they also put together for their survey, questions about how supportive professors were at Rice, how much support

00:43:31.130 - 00:43:52.700

students received from a variety of other groups, from other black students, from staff members at Rice, from family members beyond campus, and also from other Rice students, from white students at Rice. And there's also questions that made me think of the questionnaire Jan showed us from

00:43:52.700 - 00:44:18.270

Regina Tippins, questions about the academic preparedness that students felt they had when they arrived at Rice and what their high school experience was like, what was the demographic makeup of the high schools that they came from, as well as some questions about their experiences after graduation and what they had experienced beyond Rice.

00:44:18.270 - 00:44:33.170

I thought there were some interesting questions here at the end, too, about whether they would want their children to attend Rice University, and if they felt good about recruiting black students to attend Rice. And that way of putting the question kind of reminds me, Dr.

00:44:33.170 - 00:44:57.950

Ecklund, of your point about the point of surveys being to, to sort of gauge perception and feeling and the perspectives of the respondents on their experiences, which is a slightly different exercise from what we're doing as historians when we pull up the survey and immediately go to things like the date of the cover letter and the, the creator

00:44:57.950 - 00:45:19.520

of the document, and also who commissioned this particular survey, and why was it commissioned? What were, what was this Collection of Memories project, for example, and what, what were the aims of this survey, and how might that compare to the aims of different efforts along these lines that we heard about today, including the one that

00:45:19.520 - 00:45:38.870

we're engaged in right now on the task force? So let me stop there. I'm really curious to hear from our team, if you have any reactions to hearing about this survey from 1996, which I will not say is the first survey, because I also, like Dr.

00:45:38.870 - 00:45:56.760

Lopez Turley, for a long time, thought, what we were doing was one of the first, or at least, or maybe the first or one of the first. But I'll say that, that this is now perhaps the first known survey of Black Alumni of Rice University in 1996.

00:45:56.760 - 00:46:16.640

What strikes you, as, as members of this, of this team and steering committee, about this earlier effort? I have to say, my first reaction, I was just relieved that our response rate was better. Because I thought, well, I mean, surely if they could pull off, I think it's a 13%

00:46:16.640 - 00:46:33.890

response rate, back then, that's by mail, right, so that's actually pretty good considering what they had to use, and we have, we have better tools, at least we think we have better tools now, so we better get a better response rate. So I was relieved that that is indeed the case.

00:46:34.370 - 00:46:47.210

Like I said, nothing against them, 'cause they had very limited tools available and they did it by mail. Yeah. Well, it strikes me that it kind of gets to the point about updating records as well, is that to do a survey like this by mail, you needed to have the mailing

00:46:47.210 - 00:47:02.390

addresses for the people that you wanted to contact. And I'm assuming that there were a variety of different methods that you were able to use for your survey to contact people that didn't depend on a physical mailing address. So that I think is also a key difference.

00:47:02.940 - 00:47:32.570

We, we generally do these, if I may, we, Professor McDaniel, we generally do these surveys through, through web access, and then use phone as follow up. And this is, we're really, I think rightly so, amplifying Jan West's work, because she did a lot of personal following up with alums, and that was, I think, key to getting

00:47:32.570 - 00:47:52.760

that list. And we sent it out to a lot of organizations and trying to really get people to participate and still we'd wished it was greater. They also asked some of the questions that we did, and so we did, I forgot to tell folks this, so Professor Turley and I and Ms.

00:47:52.760 - 00:48:13.730

West did replicate some of the questions that had been used from like, American Association of University Surveys on race on campus and things like that, so we could situate Rice among other universities and previous surveys at Rice University, so we could situate, so we could do a little bit of comparison over time, as imperfect as that

00:48:13.730 - 00:48:27.680

is. So that was, I had not seen this one, this 1996 one, at all, and didn't even know it existed, so this is new information, but that's really neat that we have that now so we can do a little bit of comparison, potentially, as imperfect as those comparisons are.

00:48:29.820 - 00:48:49.260

Well, in addition to amplifying Jan West's crucial work, and I think here we can also amplify Dr. Kossie's work in putting this together, and it would, it raised some questions for me about how it came about and who initiated it, but one of the, one of the continuities,

00:48:49.260 - 00:49:17.320

I think, across all of these moments that we've talked about today is the efforts of black alumni themselves to spearhead these, these efforts, and collect this data. Of course, the survey that you all have done is, has come under the umbrella of this presidential task force and has that kind of institutional support, but I think

00:49:17.320 - 00:49:40.840

one question for me as a historian is, what were the levels of institutional support at each of these earlier moments for these kinds of of collection points? And I'm curious, as a historian who doesn't really understand surveys, whether, how you would react to these kind of, this range of, of options that were presented to the

00:49:40.840 - 00:49:56.500

respondents just as a matter of survey design. Did you have statements that respondents were asked to agree with? And if you did, did they agree on a five point scale? And how do you make decisions about how to label what they could choose?

00:49:56.500 - 00:50:21.990

'Cause one thing I noticed right away here is that "agree" appears in three of the, of the responses, whereas "disagree" appears in only two, and I have to go through and study the, the statements to see whether the statements were, were from an initial point of view already kind of positive, or were they what we would describe as more negative,

00:50:22.000 - 00:50:41.110

but I wonder if you have any reactions to that of the way that the survey was, was put together? I feel like I'm tanking the survey methodology in the kinds of statements that I'm asserting, so, so Ruth and I can't critique our own kind too much,

00:50:41.470 - 00:51:01.420

but I, I, sort of, like, what we would think of in survey design generally is having a balanced Likert scale, so we would have the same number of agree categories as disagree categories. So I would have preferred to have had them have, have "somewhat disagree" as a category in there too.

00:51:01.420 - 00:51:19.090

That may just have been an oversight. But what we call these kind of, of strong assertions that then people respond to are pretty typical. So this assertion of "my professors at Rice were very supportive," and getting someone to respond to that, is, is pretty typical.

00:51:20.530 - 00:51:37.540

Of course, the framing is about the person designing the survey, so you could have just as easily have said, "my professors at Rice were not supportive," right, and sort of think about the different kinds of information that you are assessing as a researcher in those different questions.

00:51:37.540 - 00:51:57.220

I think there's a rationale to be made for both, for both approaches, but. I don't know, Ruth, does it strike you in similar ways, or did you have other things you wanted to say? Well, excuse me, yeah, I was thinking that it's actually, it's somewhat similar to the

00:51:57.220 - 00:52:19.270

format that, with the range, the scale range that we used in the more recent version. But, but yeah, I was thinking through what we had, so we had strongly agree, somewhat agree, we had a neutral category of neither agree nor disagree, and then somewhat disagree and strongly disagree.

00:52:19.570 - 00:52:42.710

So it had that balance that Elaine was just referring to, but, but, but it is strikingly similar, which I think in many ways is good in case we do want to do these informal comparisons between the more recent survey and this older one. Mhm. Dr.

00:52:42.710 - 00:53:18.650

Byrd, what, do you have, or Jan, do you have any responses to this one? Well, I love when I have a question and I'm ready with it, and then I don't even have to ask it, because in the give and take of conversation, it's answered. So my question has, has been around general comparability and the ways in which

00:53:18.650 - 00:53:46.210

Professor Lopez Turley and Professor Ecklund drew some of their questions from this larger, I'm gonna call it a database, but that's not the right thing, but, you know, source about race on campus, I found real promising, because it allows, right, a sense, a certain kind of sense of where we stand, and to see that this earlier iteration of,

00:53:46.250 - 00:54:04.230

of asking questions also reflects some of that. I was just really excited as a, as a, as a researcher about the, the possibilities there. I guess the thing that I think about is the thing that I encourage people to do is to

00:54:04.230 - 00:54:27.840

stay connected. I looked at the time period, I don't know if I took that survey, but I also know that during my brief foray away from Rice into the real world, I may have missed it, moving residences, doing different, working in different positions, so that kind of reinforced, stay in touch, Rice alums.

00:54:30.180 - 00:54:54.380

I have a vague memory of it, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I did indeed do my duty and responded, but I too don't have a perfect recollection of whether I actually sent answers in. We have a, we have a question in the chat, Dr.

00:54:55.580 - 00:55:14.630

McDaniel, that I will, I will take on and make a stab at answering, and please follow up. But one of our guests asked, now that we've whet their appetite for the second time, right, when will the results of the black alumni survey be available and presented to

00:55:14.630 - 00:55:42.920

the Rice community? And the first stab at that answer is, is to say that our researchers have taken, I think, one or two passes through the data, and maybe a few more are forthcoming. But, so we don't have a date certain, but just as we have with other of

00:55:43.070 - 00:56:02.780

our materials, we fully intend to include it in our, any forthcoming updates, and of course in our final report. Dr. McDaniel. Yeah, I mean, I guess to turn the question to, to our researchers is to ask a little bit

00:56:02.780 - 00:56:26.840

about what, as you do these passes through the data, what are some of the things that survey researchers, researchers might have to do beyond just collecting the answers, to, to make sure that you're able to present the results in in a way that shows as best as you can what you're trying to to investigate?

00:56:29.370 - 00:56:48.000

I'll try, and then if, if Jan and Ruth, if you agree with me or not, but some of the things we're doing are data cleaning, so getting the data into a format that are able to be analyzed, and with this many responses, that does take a while. We work with the Office of Institutional Effectiveness at Rice, and so they were able

00:56:48.000 - 00:57:05.760

to do some of that work. They've transitioned personnel a bit, so we've asked for some new data and analyses that they're still, we're trying to figure out who will help us with that, and they've been very good so far. We also want to do some more comparing the responses to these surveys, to responses to

00:57:05.760 - 00:57:24.000

other surveys of this type, and then back to historical surveys. I think that that's important. And then doing a, there's also sometimes need to do what, what we call non-respondent bias checks, so to look at the whole list of people who participated, or who could have,

00:57:24.030 - 00:57:44.480

who were eligible, the list of people that we have records for who were eligible to participate is kind of the researcher way to say it, and then see if those folks differ in any way that we have data on from the people who did participate. And then the only thing I would add to what Elaine just said is that, excuse me, that

00:57:44.960 - 00:58:01.490

there are also some qualitative data available. And qualitative data, of course, take longer to analyze. But I think it would be, could be quite interesting to, to add those analyses as well, because there were some open-ended questions.

00:58:01.910 - 00:58:21.700

But then there is the opportunity, as Elaine mentioned briefly earlier, that there's opportunity to collect even more qualitative data from people that have stated that they're, that they are willing, willing to be interviewed. Yeah. That's one thing I was thinking about, is the, the opportunities that you all gave

00:58:22.180 - 00:58:45.370

for open response meant that there's some, there's some very short responses, but also some very long ones, and I appreciated when, when Jan was presenting the questionnaire from your roommate, Jan, that you said, well, I got permission to share this with, with the audience, because you certainly wouldn't want to, to share anything that,

00:58:45.370 - 00:59:07.780

that might violate the confidentiality that's assumed in a survey like this without making sure that you've, you've done that kind of due diligence, and then when you, when you have 600 or how many responses, I'm sorry, did you, did you get? I'm making that up, 600 is how many they asked in '96, But you said it was thirty...

00:59:07.780 - 00:59:28.390

The response, it was 520 something. 520 something, so, so I think we have to be careful there too, that's another thing that, that, that, that I know you're taking care to do as you, as you go through those, those open responses, since the survey, as I recall, as it went out, made clear to

00:59:28.390 - 00:59:50.350

respondents that this would be shared with the task force, first and foremost, to guide us in making our recommendations and understanding what people wanted to direct our attention to. I wanna thank our our team again for sharing this time with us.

00:59:50.350 - 01:00:04.360

It's always great to have guest speakers on doc talks, we're especially glad that you were, you were here, and I hope that this was helpful to our audience as well, and that you'll be back with us next Friday. I also want to give Dr.

01:00:04.360 - 01:00:20.920

Byrd a chance to remind us of an upcoming task force event that you should have on your calendars already, but if you don't, get it on your calendar soon. Dr. Byrd. So I'll do two things, and that is to remind you, at 6:30 PM, Daylight Savings Time

01:00:20.920 - 01:00:50.290

central, on April 14th, we'll be in conversation with Catherine Clack, who is celebrating 40 years at the university and some really good work here. It also allows me an opportunity to say, I, that should have been on the calendar already, the university calendar, so I am, I am, I also owe an apology.

01:00:50.290 - 01:01:08.340

I feel like I told these five, ten people last week, I was on it. I'm still on it. You mean all the other things that you had to do didn't go away over that last week? We'll get that posted as soon as we can, but I hope that, that all of you will, you have

01:01:08.340 - 01:01:20.910

advance notice that it's coming, and will get it on your calendar, 'cause we're very much looking forward to that conversation. Have a great weekend, everyone. Thanks again so much to, to our guests, for all the work you're doing and for being here.

01:01:21.570 - 01:01:27.570

Come back again, often. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

01:01:28.400 - 01:01:31.040

Thank you. Bye!