Gateway is a Quota

According to the October 7th Flat Hat, W&M President Taylor Reveley made a surprise announcement at a student club meeting Monday that the Gateway Program -- full-ride scholarships to students from a certain economic category—now has 10 million in its coffers, which is not full funding but it’s a major start. Estimated costs for Gateway run about 6 million per year for 600 full-ride students.

Reveley was the guest speaker at the Northern Neck Alumni Association on October 3rd. He did not mention the 10 million for Gateway there. Perhaps the difference is in the audience. The club where the announcement was made? The student chapter of the NAACP.  If Gateway is about economic status and not race, why announce something this big at an NAACP meeting and not at an alumni event? Is it possible that Gateway is really about race and not economics?

One way or another, the Gateway Program is at its roots a quota system, but the real problem here is once again that the College lacks transparency and accountability in its administration. By going through a club meeting and not making an official announcement, the College is ducking its responsibilities to the college community, including alumni, who have a right to know where the funding is coming from. 

Here the College gets the publicity without the accountability. Not fair, not fair at all. What happens is a delayed response from alumni and other stake holders. We hear now—indirectly-- that 10 million is on the books but that details won’t come out till late December.

What that does is soften the reaction and puts us in waiting mode for the real news to come out as promised. We will hear about it again in late December (if anyone is paying attention over Christmas break, of course) and think it is old news.

Details can’t come out for now, but oh, isn’t it wonderful that Gateway is being funded? We are supposed to just accept it all as a boon in these hard economic times, sigh, and congratulate the College on its good fortune.

We’re supposed to clap and forget about the major setbacks in State funding where faculty salaries are in peril, setbacks in an already weak Endowment, and that the College relies almost exclusively on out-of-state students to get by. According to Rector Michael Powell at last year’s tuition increase meeting, “If it weren’t for out-of-state students, we’d be bankrupt.”

But Gateway is being funded. Whew.

I am not a financial wizard, but even I know that you have to pay your rent and take care of basic home maintenance and bills before you treat someone to dinner at the Williamsburg Inn. How the College can put so much effort into a program that may have noble goals but is essentially a luxury while we struggle to keep the lights on is lost on me, especially when Financial Aid is already available to all in need.

I had higher hopes for Reveley, I really did. I hoped he’d be a model of transparency and accountability, perhaps showing the BOV just how a real leader gets the job done, but I see in this event a lack of understanding of how those concepts work. This kind of pseudo-announcement doesn’t bode well for future handling of important funding concerns.

K.K. Bruno is a 1981 graduate of the College and author of Mischiefs and Miseries: a novel of Jamestown 1607. www.kkbruno.com

Published in The Virginia Gazette, Oct. 11, 2008.