What were Operation Achievement and Passport to the Future?
Tracing the history of diversity recruitment efforts and how they were affected by campaigns against affirmative action initiatives over the years.
Operation Achievement was a program started in the Spring of 1988 that served as a cooperation between Southwestern and the Georgetown Independent School District to increase the retention rates of the Black and Latina/o middle school students by improving their basic academic skills and inspiring them towards the path of higher education.
The project was started by Dr. Gregory Washington, an Associate Professor of Philosophy, who became the Director of Multicultural Affairs in 1989. As a part of the program, groups of middle school students would come to the Southwestern campus once a week for an hour or so to get Math and English tutoring from faculty and student volunteers. As the program grew, its organizers began implementing a wider variety of educational activities for the participating students spanning a half-day or a complete school day.
The program was a huge success and continued to grow over the next few years. Dr. Washington attributed much of the program’s success to the student tutors and the Associate Director of the program, Beth Williams. However, multiple issues of The Megaphone additionally recognize Washington’s influence and prior experience as he implemented a similar program at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne in 1978.
Initial funding for the program came from the Meadows Foundation in the Fall of 1987, which at that time was one of the largest private foundations in Texas. Created in 1948 by Algur and Virginia Meadows, the foundation donated to over 1,250 institutions to aid in community and social issues across the state of Texas. In December of 1989, additional funds were granted to Southwestern by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation of Menlo Park, California, to support a community-wide effort to improve literacy rates in Williamson County.
In 1987, a similar program called Passport to the Future was organized by the part-time Instructor of Music Dr. Felecia Johnson, who became the Special Assistant to the President for Minority Student Affairs in 1989. While the program maintained a similar goal of enhancing the educational opportunities of African American and Latino students, the program was geared towards high school students with the aim of encouraging them to pursue higher education (not specifically towards enrollment at Southwestern). The 2 programs ran concurrently until 1995.
After the departure of Dr Johnson, the programs merged as Operation Achievement began taking on middle and high school students and the Passport to the Future label was no longer used. Like Operation Achievement, Passport initially functioned as a community service program, introducing underprivileged students to the experience of higher education. In the Fall of 1992, the program changed to operate more like a recruitment pipeline tool to increase the diversity of the Southwestern student population. From this point, instead of an invitation from high school counselors to participate, the students had to apply to the program themselves.
Through Operation Achievement and other recruitment initiatives, we started to see an increase in the enrollment of racial minorities at SU. In 1983 Southwestern had an average minority enrollment of 7%. By 1992 this percentage had increased to an all time high of 21% and averaged around 20% for the next 5 years, but from 1996-1998 enrollment had dramatically decreased to 12% amidst the Hopwood decision.
Hopwood versus Texas was the result of a lawsuit filed by 4 White men against the University of Texas’ law school, who claimed that classification by race within the admissions process was discriminatory against them as White applicants. The Supreme Court decided in their favor, leading to ruling specifying that any consideration of race within the university admissions process was unconstitutional. It had legal ramifications within Mississippi and Louisiana as well as Texas. This decision meant that students of color across the South were forced to seek higher education in other states as they were unable to obtain the scholarships they needed to continue their education. Although Southwestern is not a public university, it was forced to comply with these guidelines due to its use of various forms of federal funding.
To maintain the success of these diversity enrollment initiatives while complying with Hopwood, the marketing for these programs shifted to emphasize how they aid economically disadvantaged students towards a potential future in higher education as opposed to their initial emphasis on students within the racial minority at their respective high schools. This allowed Operation Achievement to maintain its presence until the Hopwood decision was rescinded in 1998 by the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn. While the demographics of the program shifted slightly during this time, the new Operation Achievement Director Susan Timourian affirmed that in 2004, 70% of the students participating in the program were racial minorities.
Operation Achievement ran concurrently with another similar, federally funded program titled Upward Bound established at Southwestern in 1999. However, by 2014 the necessity of both programs was called into question and Upward Bound completely replaced the role of Operation Achievement.
