Diallo Shabazz was a student at the University of Wisconsin in 2000 when he stopped by the admissions office.
“One of the admissions counselors walked up to me, and said, ‘Diallo, did you see yourself in the admissions booklet? Actually, you’re on the cover this year,’ ” Shabazz says.
The photo was a shot of students at a football game — but Shabazz had never been to a football game.
“So I flipped back, and that’s when I saw my head cut off and kind of pasted onto the front cover of the admissions booklet,” he says.
This Photoshopped image went viral and became a classic example of how colleges miss the mark on diversity. Wisconsin stressed that it was just one person’s bad choice, but Shabazz sees it as part of a bigger problem.
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This is old news around here. (14 years old, as noted.) How did it take NPR so long to find it? Having been on a number of campus tours with my daughter recently, I found that multiple small, private liberal arts colleges touted their diversity – in terms of students of color and in terms of international students. Funny, but it seemed that all of these “leaders” differentiated themselves with statistics that looked pretty much the same – and pretty much the same as the large public universities we looked at. It seems that colleges are like the children of Lake Wobegon – all are above average.