Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell has to walk a fine line between drawing attention to his school’s challenges and pleading for sympathy. The historically Black college, located in a distressed section of Oak Cliff, is fighting to keep it
Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell has to walk a fine line between drawing attention to his school’s challenges and pleading for sympathy. The historically Black college, located in a distressed section of Oak Cliff, is fighting to keep its doors open in the wake of last year’s decision by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to revoke the school’s accreditation because of academic and financial woes.
What sets Paul Quinn apart from other Black colleges, according to Sorrell, is its entrepreneurial focus. Noting that Historically Black Colleges and Universities run the gamut, Sorrell insists that Paul Quinn is unique in the extent to which its students are expected to take a degree of ownership in the renovation and rejuvenation of the campus, and its commitment to preparing students for a world in which the major problems confronting the Black community will be economic as much as political in nature.
In speaking about the school’s retention problems, Sorrell first notes that the overwhelming majority of colleges have their own retention challenges, making Paul Quinn far from unique. In addition, the college has created a special retention program called Leave No Quinnite Behind, geared toward freshmen and sophomores deemed at risk of dropping out.
Sorrell characterizes the SACS decision as an ill-timed body blow to a college that, he insists, has already turned the corner. The campus has raised its academic standards, has undertaken a number of capital improvement projects, and has renovated several of its buildings. Most crucially, a federal district court has ruled that Quinn will keep its accreditation until its lawsuit against SACS is resolved.
Meanwhile, the Texas Legislative Black Caucus has been busy raising funds for the school and advocating on its behalf.
The college has also recently recieved a $1 million helping hand from Trammel S. Crow, local civic leader and businessman. Crow is a long-time supporter of Paul Quinn. The donation will be used for campus improvements, including demolition of 13 abandoned buildings and replacing them with fitness areas and a floral park.
One-on-one interview with Pres. Michael Sorrell
The Dallas Examiner: Where does your accreditation fight currently stand?
Sorrell: Well, we are fully accredited. The federal district court in Atlanta has required, through the issuance of an injunction, SACS to reinstate our accreditation, or I guess reinstall us. That stays in place until the legal case is completely exhausted. We don’t have a trial date. So we’re accredited there. We have also been awarded candidacy status by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, and we were awarded that in April. We should be up for their final vote in the fall.
TDE: And what does the candidacy designation by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools entail?
Sorrell: It means that we are given five years to bring ourselves into full compliance. In the interim, we’re eligible for federal funding, which we already are because we’re still accredited. TDE: For our readers, what are the legal arguments on both sides?
Sorrell: I can’t go into that. That’s the subject of an active lawsuit. The issue is just simply the matters that have been contested, that SACS voted on, and all of those have been discussed ad nauseam. But anything particularly, when you start talking about legal arguments, I can’t talk about that. TDE: What are your long- and short-range plans for the school?
Sorrell: My long-range plan is to turn the institution into one of America’s great small colleges. That has always been our goal, and we have not deviated from that in the three years I’ve been here. The short-term goal is to continue putting the pieces in place to make sure our students get an excellent education, and that we’re taking the steps necessary to become a great small college. TDE: We’ve already discussed the accreditation battle. But aside from that, what other significant challenges, or opportunities, does the school face?
Sorrell: First of all, let me say this. I think your line of questioning misses the boat from the standpoint that we’re doing very, very well. We’re not struggling. We’re not limping along. We’re in the second year of a six-figure surplus. So we had a half a million dollar surplus last year, and we’ll have a larger surplus this year. We have completed over a million-and-a-half dollars of capital improvement projects on the campus, we have completed the second phase of a re-landscaping; in the past three years we’ve renovated the cafeteria, the student lounge, the fitness center. This summer we are introducing our first next generation classroom. So I don’t even understand people who want to perpetuate a conversation that would involve us struggling when we’re not struggling. TDE: And where does the declining enrollment fit into that story?
Sorrell: Well it fits in quite simply – one, we anticipated an enrollment decline when we began improving the institution. We had to do some right-sizing. We had a number of students here who were not serious about their education. We had some students who weren’t paying their bills; they had to go. We had some students who were disciplinary problems; they had to go. We had some students who were chronic underachievers academically, who frankly weren’t making satisfactory progress toward graduating; they had to go.
Now, we had accomplished that, which was a planned reduction. We accomplished that at the time that SACS announced their decision. But what you need to understand is this: for the incoming class in 2008, we had almost 300 people apply. At the time of the SACS announcement, we had almost 800 people apply. So we clearly had begun to turn the corner in that regard, [but] the SACS announcement cost us roughly 60 percent of our student population.
TDE: But you’re saying there have been positive developments since then.
Sorrell: Oh, it’s a completely different school. The incoming freshmen now come into a brand new bridge program, modifications to the core curriculum, which make the academic experience at the school far more exciting and relevant and rigorous, and they’re coming to a campus where there are going to be a tremendous number of physical improvements. By the time the students come in the fall, we will have knocked down almost all of the abandoned buildings. We’ve rebranded the institution; there’s a new website, a new logo.
There are two ways people can look at it, quite frankly. They can embrace the story that the mainstream media wants them to believe, or they can just come take a look and recognize that what they see is far different than they’ve been told.
TDE: What do you consider to be the college’s strongest academic programs and majors currently on offer?
Sorrell: We are focusing an enormous amount of time and attention on our business program. We are really restructuring that program because that’s going to be a focal point of the institution. We’re going to be a place that you send your children and have the confidence that they will be well educated in the business realm. Our students come from economically under-resourced families. To do anything other than prepare them for lives that acknowledge the importance of wealth and of capital accumulation I think, frankly, would be irresponsible. So we’ve embraced that.
TDE: You’ve already addressed this to some degree, but in a nutshell what makes Paul Quinn different from a big state college that someone might be considering going to?
Sorrell: We recruit two different kinds of students. If you are a student who wants to be in an environment where you can be lost in the crowd, if you want to be a fan instead of a participant in activities, then the state schools are better for you. If you want to be a student where people are going to personally invest in you in a real and tangible way, if you want to be a student where people know not only who you are but whose you are, if you want a different level of accountability, then you would pick a small, private liberal arts college. It’s no different than why students pick Williams and Amherst over University of Michigan or Berkeley. We have no desire to have ten thousand, twenty, forty, or fifty thousand students. We want small classrooms, we want to know who goes to school here and we want to create a family environment. That is why you go to small colleges.
TDE: Is there anything about your school’s plight that you feel isn’t being communicated by the press?
Sorrell: Yes, just in the nature of your question. It’s not a “plight.” I think that there’s an unwillingness of almost all sectors of the media to let go of this notion that Paul Quinn College will not be a thriving entity. We absolutely will be a thriving entity. Instead of celebrating our accomplishments, people tend to view them with disdain or disbelief. The reality is, you show me another business that can lose 60 percent of their customer base due to a one-time traumatic experience and still turn in a surplus larger than the one they had the year before; people would be celebrating that accomplishment, not trying to tear it down. And I just think it’s disappointing that so many of our media outlets tend to want to spend time portraying this as anything other than what it is, and what it is becoming one of the greatest stories in history of higher education. And at some point people have to recognize and accept that. Copyright 2010 National Newspaper Publishers Association from the Dallas Examiner
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