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Week of 27 March 1998 Vol. I, No. 25 Feature Article Not black and white BU joins Clinton's race discussion by Eric McHenry Long before the President's Initiative on Race asked college and university officials to encourage campuswide discussion of race issues during the week of April 6 to 9, Glenn Loury had scheduled two public events with precisely that objective. Because for Loury, who directs the Institute on Race and Social Division at BU, Campus Week of Dialogue on Race is every week. In early March, President Jon Westling asked Loury if an April 8 speech that was to be part of the IRSD's series of seminars might appropriately be designated a Campus Week of Dialogue on Race event. Loury said yes, adding that a symposium he'd arranged for the preceding two days could also be promoted as part of the week's happenings. On Wednesday, April 8, William Darity will speak about The Effects of the Past on Present Disparity. Because bringing his talk under the President's Initiative on Race umbrella will widen its audience, Darity, who holds the Cary Boshamer Professorship of Economics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, will offer a "less formal statistical argument" than he had planned, Loury says. The IRSD will host Mitigating the Crisis in Urban Education: Involving the Community, on Monday and Tuesday, April 6 and 7, in the BU School of Law. Its panel of speakers will include Ernesto Cortes, southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, Rev. Ray Hammond, pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston and president of the Ten Point Coalition, members of the Washington, D.C.-based Marshall Heights Community Development Organization, and other distinguished scholars and civic leaders. "There is a crisis in urban education," says Loury. "There are many potential solutions, among which is abandoning the public schools. This conference will present people, on the ground in various communities, who are staying with the public schools but trying to make them more effective." Phillip Richards, an associate professor of English at Colgate University and a visiting scholar at IRSD, has contacts within the Marshall Heights organization, a group of community activists working to improve the schools in southeast Washington, D.C. Glenn Loury Photo by Kalman Zabarsky "What we decided to do," says Loury, "having received a grant from the Donner Foundation, was to organize a conference that would include people doing comparable work in other parts of the country." Cortes, for example, has spearheaded an innovative program to improve communication between lower-income Texas families and the schools their children attend. "These are often Spanish-speaking parents," Loury says. "Some are Mexican immigrants and lower-income blacks. And there are power issues, questions about the extent to which the parents really have standing and can command the respect of the school officials. Cortes' is a story about effective organizing, mass organizing of relatively powerless people to confront a bureaucracy not as antagonists but as cooperating parties in the enterprise of getting those kids educated." Hammond, by contrast, is known in part fo